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Steps in the Development 
of American Democracy 



By 
ANDREW CUNNINGHAM McLAUGHLIN 

Professor of History, Umversity of Chicago 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



JK3f 

./Me, 5- 



Copyright, 1920, by 
ANDREW CUNNINGHAM McLAUGHLIN 



©C(.A5669S4 



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I 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Introduction 5 

Preface 7 

I. Emergence of Principles in the 

Colonial Period 11 

II. The Theories of the Revolution: 
The Formation of State Constitu- 
tions 28 

III. The Critical Years After the Rev- 

olution: The Federal Constitution 53 

IV. Jeffersonian Democracy 78 

V. Jacksonian Democracy 96 

VI. Slavery and Antislavery 117 

VII. Developments of Recent Years: 

Individualism vs. Social Control . . 146 

VIII. The Implications and Responsibil- 
ities OF Democracy To-day 168 



INTRODUCTIOlSr 

George Slocum Bennett^ a graduate of 
Wesleyan University in the class of 1864, 
showed his lifelong interest in the training 
of youth for the privileges and duties of 
citizenship by long periods of service as a 
member of the board of education of his 
home city, and as member of the boards 
of trustees of Wyoming Seminary and 
Wesleyan University. 

It was fitting, therefore, that, when the 
gifts made by himself and family to Wes- 
leyan University were combined to form a 
fund whose income should be used "in de- 
fraying the expenses of providing for visit- 
ing lecturers, preachers, and other speakers 
supplemental to the college faculty," it 
should have been decided that the primary 
purpose should be to provide each year a 
course of lectures, by a distinguished 
speaker, "for the promotion of a better un- 
derstanding of national problems and of a 
more perfect realization of the responsibih- 
ties of citizenship," and to provide for the 
publication of such lectures so that they 
might reach a larger public than the au- 
dience to which they should, in the first in- 
stance, be addressed. 

5 



6 INTRODUCTION 

To give the first course of lectures on this 
foundation, the joint committee for its ad- 
ministration, appointed by the board of trus- 
tees and by the faculty, selected Professor 
Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin, Pro- 
fessor of History in the University of Chi- 
cago, former President of the American 
Historical Association, who had some 
months earlier been sent to visit the uni- 
versities and learned societies of the United 
Kingdom to set forth to them America's 
interest in the war and the ideals of democ- 
racy which America in common with Britain 
was prepared to uphold even on the field of 
battle. 

The poignant earnestness which pervades 
the lectures marks them as the father's me- 
morial to his son who, like many other 
American college lads, had recently fallen 
on the field of battle in France that the ideals 
of democracy might live and prevail. 

William Arnold Shanklin^ 
Reuben Nelson Bennett, 
Albert Wheeler Johnston, 
Caleb Thomas Winchester, 
George Matthew Dutcher, 

Committee. 



PREFACE 

The purpose of these lectures is not to 
present the history of American democracy 
in full and symmetrical outline. If one 
should enter upon that task, he would find 
himself writing at length the history of the 
United States. My purpose is simply to re- 
count a few salient experiences which helped 
to make America what it is — for experiences 
create character. And I wish also to describe 
certain basic doctrines and beliefs, some of 
which may have had their day, while others 
have not yet reached fulfillment. Especially 
I have not attempted to discuss fully and 
elaborately the problems of democracy as 
they arose in the generation after the Civil 
War, but only to show how those problems, 
in certain essential particulars, centered in 
the task of regulating the use of property 
and adjusting the old ideas of personal 
liberty to the new needs of the social and in- 

7 



8 PREFACE 

dustrial order. The problems of democracy 
have grown thick and fast in the last decade ; 
and these too I have not sought to discuss in 
any detail, contenting myself with describing 
the implications of democracy as we now may 
and should see democracy after a century 
and more of development and after a war 
waged for its maintenance and upbuilding. 

The lectures were given to the students of 
Wesleyan University in the spring of 1919. 
I hope they were of some service and that 
in printed form they will have some slight 
value in making clear a few leading facts and 
principles in American history and politics. 

A. C. McL. 
University of Chicago. 



WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 



GEORGE SLOCUM BENNETT FOUNDATION 



LECTURES 



For the Promotion of a Better Under- 
standing of National Problems and 
of a More Perfect Realization of 
the Responsibilities of Citizenship. 



FIRST SERIES— 1918-1919 



CHAPTER I 

EMERGENCE OF PRINCIPLES IN 
THE COLONIAL PERIOD 

It is difficult to begin a course of lectures 
on American democracy because one does 
not know where to find a beginning. 
Wherever he may start in his recital, he is 
conscious that, before the particular period 
chosen, forces were at work that account for 
later conditions. American democracy is, of 
course, intimately connected with the long 
effort of Englishmen, even before America 
was settled, to combat tyrannical or absolute 
government. I will not, however, allow my- 
self to comment on those origins, but will 
take up the story with just a word about the 
transference of English representative insti- 
tutions to America in the early seventeenth 
century. The setting up of a representative 
body in the wilds of Virginia in 1619, that 
first step in the recognition of the colonists 
as human beings who were entitled to some 

word in the management of themselves, is a 

11 



12 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

salient fact in the history of the British em- 
pire, as well as the beginning of American 
democracy. It is of immense significance as 
the beginning of a policy of colonial self- 
government, and thus the beginning not only 
of the American democratic system but of 
that far-flung British empire, that union of 
free commonwealths which, with all its lack 
of symmetry and legalistic form, is the great- 
est political structure in the world. 

We should notice, however, that this rep- 
resentative assembly was not established by 
direction of the British government. It was 
called by the mandate of a corporation, a 
great mercantile company, similar to other 
large corporations which were in those days 
reaching out for the commerce of the world. 
The use which England has made of the 
corporation as an agency for colonization 
and commerce is so extensive that one can 
hardly overemphasize it ; but I am not speak- 
ing here of the influence of the corporation 
charter on the constitutional forms of the 
colonies, but of the act of the corporation, 
itself resident in London, in calling an as- 
sembly of representatives in Virginia. The 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 13 

Virginia Company, composed of many 
prominent men, was divided into two parties : 
one the progressive and the Hberal, the other 
the conservative and the rigid. The liberals 
had more in mind than making money from 
a commercial venture. Some of them were 
profoundly interested in the very theory of 
government and so taken up with the pivotal 
problems of politics that they could not think 
of Virginia as only a tobacco plantation 
or a producer of dividends. Though the 
differences of opinion in this corporation 
are more evident a year or two after the 
decision to give to the colonists an as- 
sembly of representatives, we can see that 
at least as early as 1618 the divergent 
tendencies of the two elements were at work. 
On the one side was Sir Thomas Smythe, a 
leading big business man, interested in the 
various large commercial enterprises of the 
time. On the other side was a group of 
young idealists, the leader Sir Edward 
Sandys. The Smythe faction said that 
Sandys and his followers were "men of dis- 
course and contemplation and not of reason 
and judgment." 



14 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

"Of discourse and contemplation" — mere 
talkers and thinkers, not active men of busi- 
ness with sound, hard sense. How often 
have these words been used to describe ideal- 
ists who were prepared to take a bold step 
forward and a steady look onward into the 
future! Sandys was a disciple of Richard 
Hooker, whom I venture to call the founder 
of that school of political theory which 
gained tremendous vigor in seventeenth- 
century England and was finally embodied 
in the institutions of the United States. It 
is a strange and dramatic fact that the man 
intent upon planting in the wilds of Virginia 
this first seed from which American constitu- 
tionalism sprang, should have actually had 
in his mind the distinct theories which, as the 
decades went by, were gathered up in our 
fundamental law, and that he should have 
consciously held the very ideals for which 
Virginians and other Americans fought a 
century and a half later. ^ 



^ I know, of course, that Hooker's theories were not en- 
tirely like those that developed in the seventeenth century, 
but the fundamental fact remains that his statement of the 
origin of government in consent was of tremendous im-' 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 15 

It is a source of consuming interest and 
pleasure to hunt out expressions and pur- 
poses of political justice and to discover 
visions of right amid the controversies and 
more deliberate discussions of a corporation 
dealing with tobacco and Indians and trade 
and land grants. Of Sandys it was said 
that "no man in the world carried a more 
malitious heart to the government of a 
monarchic," and that he himself declared 
"that if our God from heaven did constitute 
and direct a forme of Government, it was that 
of Geneva." He belonged, in other words, 
to that body of believers in the fundamental 
rights of man who were to become stronger 
as the century waxed older, were to wage 
war against the Stuarts, and were finally, at 
the end of the century, to depose James II 
because he had broken the original compact 
between king and people. If he were a real 
and consistent idealist, Sandys could not 



portance in the years to come. I know too that Hooker 
did not invent this theory, for it was of hoary antiquity 
when he wrote his Ecclesiastical Polity. But it was he who 
said, "Laws they are not, therefore, which public approbation 
hath not made so." 



16 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

very well refrain from seeking to promote in 
Virginia his own ideas of political right. 
For even in Parhament as early as 1614 he 
had boldly announced the principles of his 
philosophy. I call attention to these prin- 
ciples not as merely incidental but as an ex- 
pression of fundamental pohtical theory by 
one whom we may justly call the first Ameri- 
can statesman — an American statesman, 
though he never lived in America, because he 
was the founder of representative govern- 
ment in the New World and the propounder 
of the elements of American political theory. 
In a speech in Parliament in 1614 he used 
these words — condensed, of course in the 
report: "No successive king, but first 
elected. — Election double, of Person, and 
Care; but both come in by Consent of the 
People, and with reciprocal conditions be- 
tween King and People. — That King, by 
Conquest, may also (when Power) be ex- 
pelled." An expansion of this speech would 
become a treatise upon the origin of govern- 
ment. Of that we shall have more to say 
hereafter ; but we can see here a denial of the 
intrinsic or inherent authority of the mon- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 17 

arch, an assertion of the origin of kingly- 
power in contract, a declaration of the con- 
sent of the gOTcrned, an announcement that 
there were people, and that care for them 
was the condition of continuing authority, 
and, lastly, a denial of the principle of pas- 
sive obedience; for the king that ruled by 
force and not by right and that did not care 
for his people could be expelled. 

Contenting ourselves with this word of 
reference to Sandys and the group of liberals 
who founded representative government in 
Virginia, let us turn to the early history of 
the northern colonies. Here, again, we are 
looking for principles and ideas and not 
merely for events in the ordinary sense, and 
I shall select only one or two of these ideas as 
the most significant. No one can under- 
stand the history of New England without 
some knowledge of church history, and espe- 
cially the history of the Separatists. In the 
reign of Elizabeth a few obscure men, amid 
many concerned with problems of ecclesias- 
tical order, affirmed that a small number of 
individuals coming together could constitute 
a church. This belief is to us so self-evident 



18 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

that it does not appeal to us as more than a 
dreary commonplace; and yet it is of great 
moment: a few simple men could found an 
institution which men had been wont to think 
of as an institution of vast power and august 
majesty; it was almost as if they had said 
that two or three gathered together can form 
an empire. 

The church, as those men conceived it, was 
an association of individuals; and the indi- 
vidual, free before God and under God, hav- 
ing his own immediate relationship with the 
divine sovereign authority, could voluntarily 
join with others and form the church. Those 
two elementary thoughts I wish most 
strongly to emphasize, for they will be found 
running through American history, showing 
themselves in unexpected places. There is 
such a thing as an individual, a separate self- 
determining being; and several individuals, 
hitherto quite separate and independent, can 
by covenant and agreement constitute a new 
entity, a new thing. The creation of some- 
thing which possessed real character, au- 
thority and duty, by the voluntary consent of 
hitherto detached elements, constitutes one 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 19 

main pillar of early American democratic 
theory. 

If we had time to study in detail the early 
history of Massachusetts and Connecticut, 
we should discover many illustrations of the 
two fundamental ideas that I have just men- 
tioned. Men's minds turned to contract, 
promise, consent, as the bases of church 
organization; and naturally they conceived 
governmental authority of all kinds as aris- 
ing in this way. From time immemorial 
men have inquired — ^thinking men — ^how it 
came about that one man or one set of men 
have the right to order others to do or not to 
do. Naturally, the men of New England 
believed that authority sprang from the en- 
trance of men into the social relation and 
from contract which they voluntarily made. 
We find views of political relationship, of 
ecclesiastical polity and of theology itself, 
embodying the notion that contract was the 
source of binding authority. Even if God 
did not obtain His supreme authority from 
the consent of men. He, the supreme au- 
thority, was Himself in a contractual rela- 
tionship with man and was bound by His 



20 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

own promises. Thomas Hooker, the 
founder of Connecticut, said: "Among such 
who by no impression of nature, no rule of 
providence or appointment from God or 
reason have power over each other; there 
must of necessity be a mutual engagement 
each of the other, by their free consent, be- 
fore by any rule of God they have any right 
or power, or can exercise either, each toward 
the other. This appears in all covenants 
betwixt Prince and People, Husband and 
Wife, Master and Servant, and most pal- 
pable is the expression of all this in all con- 
federations and corporations. . . . They 
should first freely ingage in such covenants, 
and then be careful to fulfil such duties." 

John Cotton declared: "It is evident by 
the light of nature, that all civill Relations 
are founded in Covenant. For to pass by 
natural Relations between Parents and Chil- 
dren, and violent Relations between Con- 
querors and Captives, there is no other way 
given whereby a people sui juris free from 
naturall and compulsory engagements, can 
be united or combined to-gether into one vis- 
ible body to stand by mutuall Relation, fel- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 21 

low members of the same body but only by 
mutuall covenant; as appeareth between 
husband and wife in the family. Magistrate 
and subjects in the Commonwealth, fellow- 
citizens in the same cities." 

To illustrate at all adequately the expres- 
sion of these fundamental theories in early 
New England would carry us far beyond the 
time at our disposal. Let us content our- 
selves now with one other elementary belief, 
and then we shall be able to move on to later 
times when these theories showed themselves 
in the struggle of a nation for self-govern- 
ment. This elementary belief was belief in 
the existence of fundamental law. This con- 
ception of unchanging and unchangeable 
right, this belief that there were certain fixed 
immutable principles, can be seen in various 
phases of political thought in England espe- 
cially in the seventeenth century. On its 
purely political side, this thought was ar- 
rayed against the claim or the pretension to 
absolute and arbitrary authority in govern- 
ment. In its origin it is doubtless associated 
with the belief in the unchanging and un- 
varying law of God which must be superior 



22 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

to any law of man. Thoroughly arbitrary 
government, one unlimited in its power and 
authority, was, thought the English hberals 
of the seventeenth century, a government 
disregarding principles of right superior to 
all human authority. Both sides — those de- 
fending the unlimited power of monarchical 
sovereignty and those denying the rightful 
existence of such authority — really took 
refuge in the supremacy of divine will; for 
one side asserted the divine right of kings 
and held up the King as the possessor of 
authority obtained from on high, while the 
other side set forth the reality of divine law 
— natural law — ^binding on all human gov- 
ernment and limiting the authority of the 
monarch himself. Naturally, the New Eng- 
land settlers, the offshoots of English liberal- 
ism and Puritanism, believed in the unchang- 
ing authority of divine or natural law. A 
study of the intensely interesting years of 
Massachusetts' history in the first fifteen 
years after the founding of Boston discloses, 
in the little primitive settlements, currents 
and counter currents that are curiously in- 
dicative of the old antagonism between 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 23 

classes and of the desire of the plain people 
to bind government in such a way that 
certain rights and privileges should not be 
endangered. "The deputies," said Governor 
Winthrop, "having conceived great danger 
to our state, in regard that our magistrates, 
for want of positive laws, in many cases, 
might proceed according to their discretions, 
it was agreed that some men should be ap- 
pointed to frame a body of grounds of laws, 
in resemblance to a Magna Charta, which, 
being allowed by some of the ministers 
and the general court, should be re- 
ceived for fundamental laws." This move- 
ment, which arose, be it noticed, out of 
suspicion of unchecked government, resulted 
in the establishment of the famous Body of 
Liberties — a code of fundamental laws, 
based itself on the Bible, on the principles of 
English liberty, and on the reason and judg- 
ment of its framers. 

I would not assert that democracy in any 
full sense existed in Massachusetts — possibly 
not even in Plymouth. The early history of 
the Boston colony discloses clearly a sharp 
contrast between principles of aristocracy 



24 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

and a considerable amount of democratic 
theory in the sense that government ought 
not to be wholly in the hands of superior 
beings. The movement from the Bay towns 
to the Connecticut Valley may have been, as 
Charles Francis Adams says, only the nat- 
ural swarming of a people who, seeing the fer- 
tility of the charming Connecticut valley, 
had a "hankering mind after it." But there 
certainly were diametric differences of opin- 
ion between Hooker, the founder of Connec- 
ticut, and Winthrop, the leader of the Bay 
colony. "Matters of counsel and judica- 
ture," said Winthrop, ought not to be re- 
ferred to the main body of the people; "the 
best part is always the least, and of that best 
part, the wiser part is always the lesser." 
Hooker, on the other hand, declared: "In 
matters of greater consequence, which con- 
cern the common good, a general council, 
chosen by all, to transact businesses which 
concern all, I conceive, under favour, most 
suitable to rule and most safe for the relief 
of the whole." John Cotton — the ecclesias- 
tical rival of Hooker — on the other hand had 
announced, "Democracy I do not conceive 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 25 

that God did ordain as a fit government 
either for church or commonwealth." 

We have thus taken a hasty glance at a 
few incidents in early colonial history and 
seen the announcement or the appearance of 
a few primal ideas, which in one way or an- 
other underlie American democracy. I am 
not prepared to say that they are the sup- 
porting theories of our present-day democ- 
racy even as a form of government or as a 
body of political theory; but what we know 
as democracy actually began with the 
emergence of principles which justified the 
right of the individual under government, 
with the assertion that men set up govern- 
ments and that governments should be re- 
strained by some fixed law ; and, for our pur- 
pose of perhaps even greater consequence, 
was the doctrine that men by contract as- 
sociated themselves into political society. 
Without mentioning the thought and striv- 
ings of the seventeenth century, one could 
have no background and no perspective for 
understanding the principles of later democ- 
racy, and I have given this hasty exposition 
to banish the impression that the theories of 



26 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

the American Revolution and of the early- 
national period had no ancestry, but sprang 
full-armed from the brains of the statesmen 
and pamphleteers of the later eighteenth 
century. It is well always to remember that 
the cleavage of the British race took place in 
the seventeenth century, and, while after the 
end of that century we find no great out- 
pouring of political theory and it is difficult 
to trace from written utterance the line of 
growth, American political principles were 
those of the century of Pym and Milton and 
Harrington and Locke and John Lilburne 
and countless other liberal, revolutionary, 
and radical leaders who strove for the recog- 
nition of man's fundamental rights under 
government. 

Of course mere political theory unattached 
to the practical and immediate problems of 
life cannot be very effective. Political 
philosophy grows out of political and social 
needs, and is often a result rather than a 
cause of social action ; but the writings of the 
seventeenth century — ^real political pam- 
phlets — portray political purpose. And no 
one could venture to say that the cogent 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 27 

expression of a theory, even if unattainable 
in its full force, has no effect in building up 
opinion, stimulating action and giving direc- 
tion and coherence to a movement or a tend- 
ency. Such beyond question was the effect 
of the writings of the pamphleteers, poets, 
and philosophers of the seventeenth century. 
I must not omit, however, all mention of the 
fact that the Americans not only illustrated 
in actuality the organization of political and 
ecclesiastical order, but, living as they did 
free in considerable measure from the repres- 
sive burdens and traditions of the Old 
World, were able to feel more strongly than 
the people of Europe the worth and the right 
of the individual man. Through the first 
half of the eighteenth century the develop- 
ment of the American colonists in the prac- 
tices of self-government gave them a basis 
for the philosophy with which they ap- 
proached the problems of the American 
Revolution. 



28 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 



CHAPTER II 

THE THEORIES OF THE REVO- 
LUTION; THE FORMATION 
OF STATE CONSTITUTIONS 

The period of the American Revolution, 
from the viewpoint of American pohtical de- 
velopment, may be said to begin with the 
outbreak of the Old French War and with 
the attempted organization of the colonies, 
that they might bear their fair and propor- 
tionate share in the defense and maintenance 
of the empire ; it ends with the formal estab- 
lishment of the American "empire" in the 
Constitution of the United States — a gen- 
eration of discussion, agreement, and dis- 
agreement, a discussion in which men were 
thinking as well as talking and writing, and 
in which certain definite behef s, the products 
of thought and talk, found lodgment in basic 
institutions and in the announcement of cer- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 29 

tain elemental principles of political ethics. 
The period ought not to be called the Revo- 
lutionary era, but the creative era of Ameri- 
can history. The period is too often divided 
into two parts, necessitating a division of 
treatment of cardinal tendencies; the first 
part (1760-1783) is treated as if the sole 
object of study was to explain the war; the 
study of the later period (1783-1789) deals 
with the discontent and confusion of recon- 
struction from which came the Federal Con- 
stitution. As a matter of fact, through that 
whole generation men were engaged in the 
development of ideas which were finally em- 
bodied in the State and national constitutions. 
The discussions and the perplexities of that 
generation were concerned with three differ- 
ent problems, which were not always closely 
distinguished one from the other. The first 
problem was that of trade and commerce and 
general economic well-being. The second 
was that of the authority of government over 
men : did government have unrestrained au- 
thority, or was it limited by the necessity of 
preserving the life, property, and liberty of 
the people? The third was that of finding a 



30 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

suitable structure of empire — at first, the 
structure of the British imperial system, later 
the structure or what should be the structure 
of the American pohtical system as a whole. 
In other words, this third problem involved 
in its later phase the task of working out a 
system of political organization for the 
United States, for the combination of re- 
publics which had been colonies and had 
emerged into self-governing commonwealths. 
Of these problems I shall not discuss the 
first in any detail. I do not doubt the influ- 
ence of economic forces in history, the con- 
tinuing effect of imperial and state financial 
needs, the unremitting pressure of commer- 
cial rivalries between merchants and among 
nations and States. I do not doubt that in 
the American Revolution pecuniary ad- 
vantage often underlay political demands, 
and that dread of pecuniary loss helped to 
fashion parties and coteries and especially to 
create or strengthen conservative and reac- 
tionary tendencies. I do not question that 
wealth, or what then passed for wealth, and 
poverty, or what then was thought to be 
poverty, furnished grounds of difference 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 31 

between political elements and accounted for 
diflFerent political theories. No one can 
question the unintermittent conflict of inter- 
est between classes of society, or at least be- 
tween grades of economic well-being. But I 
shall not attempt for the present to discuss 
these antagonisms or variations of interest, 
for we may well employ our time chiefly in 
considering the thought of the time that came 
to be embodied in actual working institutions 
of government. For even if we accept the 
belief — ^which I certainly do not — ^that the 
cause of all movement and all striving is 
economic discontent or the play of economic 
force, we may still be permitted to direct our 
attention to the legal formulation of de- 
mands, to the appearance of political formu- 
lae and principles, to the embodiment of those 
principles in institutions and actual political 
practices. There is at the present time, in 
my judgment, altogether too much of a 
tendency among historians to attribute 
motives solely to economic conditions. 
Though the old-fashioned treatment of the 
Revolution was misleading because of its 
failure to assess and weigh properly all kinds 



32 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

of economic antitheses, the fact remains that 
different principles of government were 
arrayed against each other; and it is 
quite wrong to imagine that men are not 
wiUing to sacrifice material gain for liberty 
and for the sense that they are not subject to 
the will of others. 

Of course, as far as purely political argu- 
ment went, it was directed by the Americans 
against the authority of Parliament in one or 
more particulars; they argued either that 
Parliament did not possess the right of taxa- 
tion because that right belonged to the 
colonies, as constituent parts of the empire, or 
because, on general principles of human and 
British liberty, a body in which they were not 
represented had no right to taxation. These 
two lines of argument were not conflicting 
but mutually supporting. Let us notice 
here, however, that one of these lines of argu- 
ment, based on the practices of the old 
empire, led finally to the establishment of the 
Constitution of the United States. The 
argument that the colonies as colonies, as 
constituent parts of the empire, had an in- 
defeasible share of authority, the actual legal 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 33 

right to govern themselves in the matter of 
taxation and internal police, was an assertion 
that the British empire was not a simple 
centralized empire but one in which powers 
of government were distributed. As men 
by their conscious thoughts and open discus- 
sion at least assist in creating social and 
political order, it may properly be claimed 
that this method of protest against central- 
ized authority in the empire helped to bring 
in the federal state/ It took a generation of 
experience, some experimenting, and a good 
deal of actual discussion and contemplation, 
before the frame and form of what I venture 



^ The federal state, a system of organization now adopted 
in many parts of the world, was first put in working order 
when the Constitution of the United States was adopted. 
If we view such a state as one characterized by the classi- 
fication of powers (or authorities) and the deposit of certain 
powers in certain places, that classification and the theory 
underlying it grew out of the practices of the old British 
empire. I mean by "powers" such things as the power to 
manage the post office, the power to regulate interstate and 
foreign commerce, the power to handle foreign affairs, all 
of which belong to the central government, while local com- 
merce, the maintenance of local order, and a thousand other 
things are in the hands of the 'parts of the system. This 
whole subject is dealt with in my article on the "Background 
of American Federalism" in America and Britain. (N. Y. 
1919.) 



34 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

to call imperial organization was properly 
worked out and the Constitution of the 
United States adopted. 

This may appear to you to have nothing to 
do with the developments of American 
democracy. But it must be looked upon as 
an achievement of a free people ; moreover, a 
suitable and viable scheme, whereby things 
essentially national could be managed by 
a national government while things es- 
sentially local could be handled by the 
State governments, was an absolute requisite 
for the stability of democratic institutions, as 
democracy was then developed ; it was neces- 
sary for the upbuilding of the spirit and es- 
sence of a wider democracy of continent-wide 
sympathies and loyalties. Furthermore, we 
are strangely likely to forget in these modern 
days that local self-government has always 
been considered a necessary part of demo- 
cratic government. If in these days of con- 
tinent-wide nationalism we lose sight of that 
fact, it should not be forgotten in con- 
sidering the history of democracy. The 
participation of people in their own imme- 
diate government may still, possibly, be con- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 35 

sidered an essential quality of the demo- 
cratic state. 

The argument of the Revolution, as we 
have said, was directed against the authority 
of Parliamentary government, and, while 
much was said about the privileges of the 
colonies as political entities, a considerable 
part of the discussion concerned the rights of 
individual men and British citizens. Democ- 
racy as it developed in America was long 
involved in the task of finding suitable re- 
straints upon government and asserting the 
right to be free from objectionable govern- 
mental control. Revolutionary debates be- 
gan with protests against certain kinds of 
governmental activity, and for decades men 
discussed the need of having a limited and 
checked government if they would be free. 
James Otis's famous speech on the Writs of 
Assistance (1761) announced the privileges 
of British subjects, denied that an act of 
Parliament distinctly contrary to principles 
of British liberty was law, and declared that 
an act contrary to natural equity would be 
held void by the courts. Little as we know 
about Otis's statements, we can find in them 



36 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

( 1 ) the belief that Britain had a constitution 
sufficiently plain to limit the authority of 
Parliament; (2) that there was such a thing 
as natural right beyond the touch of the most 
august legislative body in the world ; and (3) 
that an act violating natural justice was 
simply not a law at all. 

If Otis's assertions had been quite unique 
or a mere oratorical pronouncement, they 
would not merit extended examination or 
comment ; but, as a matter of fact, they ex- 
emphfy various fundamentals of Revolu- 
tionary thought which were made over into 
American institutions of government and 
constituted in considerable measure the 
fundamentals of American democracy. ) We 
may notice, therefore, the idea of a constitu- 
tion, belonging of course to Britain, protect- 
ing Enghshmen everywhere, something more 
real, tangible, and effective than the actual 
constitution such as the people of England 
then had or do have. The thing most nearly 
new, though here too, as I have said, Otis 
thought he found basis for it in British juris- 
prudence, was that a law contrary to natural 
law, that is, a law contrary to the funda- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 37 

mental law underlying all free government, 
was not law at all. He did not say that an 
act violating the Constitution was unjust or 
unwise or in violation of precedent; it was 
not law at all. The principles of natural 
justice were, moreover, beyond the reach 
of government. 

We need not say that there was anything 
new in the argument by Otis ; he referred to 
the declarations of British jurists, and he 
thought doubtless that he was announc- 
ing sober and unrevolutionary prin- 
ciples. The whole Revolutionary theory as 
far as it referred to fundamental law, 
principles of natural equity, and the lim- 
ited scope of government, had been put 
forth time and again in almost, if not abso- 
lutely, completed form by the English rebels 
of the seventeenth century. And we have 
already noticed the expression of this phil- 
osophy in early colonial times. The im- 
portance of Otis's assertions hes in their 
reality, in the fact that they were to be used 
in a great pohtical crisis, and that they were 
to be built into institutions of government, 
into law, and into the thought of plain 



38 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

people. In other words, this rebellion in 
British history was to be effective ; it was to 
place, in actual vital functioning forms, 
principles for which Enghshmen had given 
their lives. The Americans took these 
theories and principles of unchanging law 
and natural justice seriously and used them 
in carrying on and in carrying through a 
successful revolution. 

Through a good deal of American discus- 
sion, as the days went by, ran the line of ideas 
which we have seen in Otis's speech. It was 
characteristic of the Americans in their argu- 
ments to claim as already their own, as 
already fully existing, what in reahty they 
were going to produce and make tangible, 
actual, and active. That is why I have 
called the period a creative period, though 
little really new thought came to light; and 
that is why what we call the Revolution was 
not a revolution in the destructive sense, 
though it broke the British empire ; it was an 
upbuilding process, a movement forward, a 
realizing of principles, an actualizing of 
ideas. 

In what respect did the colonists claim that 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 39 

they already possessed what in reahty they 
were to make? They asserted the existence 
of a rigid constitution beyond the reach of 
legislative power. They declared that in all 
free states the constitution is fixed and that it 
was the glory of Britain that it had such a 
constitution; and this they declared with 
solemn assurance, though there was not then 
in the world a fixed constitution of an inde- 
pendent state above and beyond the reach of 
legislative authority. They denied that an 
act beyond the constitution was good law at 
all, but in reality there was no such principle 
actually in operation, either in Britain or in 
any other country. They claimed the exist- 
ence of certain rights of person and prop- 
erty, for the safeguarding of which govern- 
ment was created. They conceived of 
government, not as possessed of intrinsic and 
inherent powers, but of delegated power 
only. They looked upon government as 
sprung from the free will and expressed wish 
of the people and subject to alteration at the 
desire of the people. The task of that gen- 
eration was to carry forward those assertions 
till they were taken out of the domain of 



40 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

mere philosophy or of poUtical controversy 
and were placed securely in tangible achieve- 
ment and in actual institutions/ 

It was of immense consequence that the 
Revolutionary leaders did not ostensibly ad- 
vocate the overthrow of the old and the well- 
estabUshed. They proclaimed their undying 
fidelity to the British constitution and un- 
swerving loyalty to the king. Indeed, in 
early days they acknowledged all "due sub- 
ordination" to Parliament. They reproached 
the Englishmen with being the real violators 
of precedent and of established legal right; 
the Englishmen were, so to speak, the rebels. 
The Revolution was thus protected from de- 
generating into a riotous attack upon all 
authority, from being merely an assault on 
what was old, and from losing itself in mere 
vague denunciation or in the announcement 
of wild theories. And because it was of this 
character, it was characteristically a British 



^ The breaking up of the British empire — the Revolution — 
was a momentous fact; but the ideas underlying the struggle 
and the establishment of our public law embracing those 
ideas must be considered of chiefest significance in the 
history of free government. 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 41 

revolution and fits into the history of the de- 
velopment of British liberty. 

Many times in the course of human history 
men had discussed the authority of govern- 
ment or the duty of the subject to obey, and 
in doing so they inevitably turned to the 
origin of government or the state. And so 
did the Americans — once again absolutely 
without inventing new ideas — -when they 
questioned the power of Parliament. While 
they cited charters, referred to practices and 
precedents, and set out the British constitu- 
tion as the basis of their rights, they ex- 
amined, like the philosophers of old, the 
source of authority. For if it could be main- 
tained that government was self -created or 
come direct from the Ruler of the universe, 
then naturally the government must be 
obeyed and was beyond the control of the 
people. The necessity of accounting for the 
origin of government, as we have already 
seen, explains the doctrine of the divine right 
of kings on the one hand and the popular 
origin of government through contract and 
consent on the other. Thus, among the 
foundations of American democracy was this 



42 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

insistence upon the principle that men made 
government and made it for their own needs. 
Such a thought, hke many other things I 
have mentioned, doubtless now appears quite 
ordinary common sense, and we need to re- 
mind ourselves that within these later months 
our boys have gone to Europe to aid in over- 
throwing the remnants of monarchical pre- 
sumption based on the assumption of divine 
appointment. 

The American philosophy supposed a 
state of nature from which men entered into 
a state of society or from which they emerged 
to put themselves under government. There 
never was a state of nature such as these men 
supposed, and there never was a social con- 
tract which bound men in society and in 
obligation to authority. But the idea, how- 
ever historically untrue, was of immense 
consequence, and it served not alone as a 
starting point in argument but as a founda- 
tion for the constructive work of the period. 
If we examine this idea critically, we find it 
used to explain the origin of government and 
thus to give basis for opposition and, in ad- 
dition, to furnish a set of irrefutable prin- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 43 

ciples. It is very helpful to have a set of 
absolutes in any political controversy; and 
they were found by supposing the existence 
of the absolute man, a detached abstracted 
man possessed by the law of nature and of 
nature's God with a few primitive and un- 
deniable rights. These rights, antedating 
all government, were not to be taken away by 
the government that was created to protect 
them. If Parliament set up its unalloyed 
sovereignty, it could be answered by an as- 
sertion that unlimited authority was of God 
alone, and that man obtained from God and 
nature the absolute unqualified rights to life, 
liberty, and property. 

May I call your attention again to the fact 
that all this thinking takes for granted the 
existence of the individual, that is, the abso- 
lute, unrelated man, who existed as an unre- 
lated being before government; he did not 
become the owner of property because his 
right to hold it was protected by law; he had 
a right to it before governments were known. 
Men did not then say: "You are what you 
are because of the existence and the operation 
of the social order ; you have what you have 



44 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

because of the play of social forces ; you could 
have no property, you would only have 
things, if by force you could maintain your 
hold on them, unless there were government 
and law. You are the creature of a long 
historical process; and society and state are 
real things with their own duties and with 
laws of their own being." Had they thus 
spoken, they would not have belonged to the 
eighteenth century at all; such words are 
modern and do not belong in the field of 
early American democracy. 

All this political theory, all this talk about 
natural right and absolute man, may not 
seem to be democracy at all, as you now 
think of democracy ; but I am not describing 
democratic thinking of to-day or the vague 
assumptions concerning the content of 
democracy. I am describing the thinking of 
a hundred and forty years ago, as far as it 
expressed itself in political principles. It 
must be understood before there is place for 
discussion of the achievements of democracy 
as a working system in America. Democ- 
racy, as we now see it, whether a pervading 
social sentiment or a form and process of 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 45 

practical politics, has nothing to do with the 
contractual character of the social system. 
We have no "absolute" with which to deal, 
save that what is wrong is wrong, and we 
know it is wrong from experience and its 
wrongness is proved by its production of 
human misery. Or we may say — and here 
the historical student would have to agree — 
we maintain it is wrong because it violates 
our individual sense of right, and beyond 
that individual sense, which has been begot- 
ten by developing human experience, we 
know not where to turn for judgment as to 
what should not be done. 

Whether the political philosophy of the 
Revolution appear very real to you or not, 
it furnished the basis for the organization of 
democratic institutions. The Revolution 
was the process of change from colonies to 
independent commonwealths ; and during the 
course of the war constitutions were formed 
and legal governments were estabhshed. 
The leaders of the Revolution had in this 
task the opportunity to make real their 
principles of government. John Adams an- 
nounced that the theories of the "wisest 



46 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

writers" should be followed, and that the 
people should raise the whole fabric of con- 
stitutional government with their own hands. 
He meant, of course, that the principles that 
the government sprang from the people and 
was the agent of the people should be lived 
up to in the method of establishing the new 
government of the American States. 

If the theories of the "wisest writers" were 
to be followed; if, in other words, this phil- 
osophy of the origin of government and the 
responsibility of government to people was 
to be made real, then the method pursued 
in setting up the government must be 
carefully adapted to the theory. Two 
States alone succeeded in finding a system 
which was theoretically and completely 
sound. These were Massachusetts and New 
Hampshire. In Massachusetts, after one 
constitution had been presented to the 
people and been rejected, the people were 
asked by the Revolutionary government if 
they desired a constitution, and if they did, 
to elect delegates to a convention, chosen for 
the sole and single purpose of drafting a 
constitution. The people voted in the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 47 

affirmative and chose the delegates, who met 
in convention. The constitution drafted by 
the convention was submitted to the people, 
discussed in the town meetings, adopted, and 
then put into operation. The constitution 
purported to be a social compact, and it may 
justly be said that the whole operation il- 
lustrated as nearly as anything could the 
philosophy of contract and the establishment 
of government on the consent of the 
governed. 

While the establishment of constitu- 
tional government was under discus- 
sion in Massachusetts, the nature of the 
whole contract arrangement was presented 
with amusingly technical and legalistic 
thoroughness. Theophilus Parsons, writing 
the Essex Result, treats of the nature of the 
contract almost in the terms he would have 
used, had he been discussing an agreement 
between several people for the building of a 
house or the purchase and sale of a drove of 
sheep. All and each are bound by their in- 
dividual promises; but there are certain 
inalienable rights that no one can contract 
away. In this constitution and the process 



48 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

of making it we find tke clearest and most 
explicit exposition of the philosophy of 
American political democracy, in the days 
when it reared its first institutions. 

As an inevitable consequence from the 
method followed, as well as from the theories 
announced, we find these fundamental 
principles: (1) the individual exists before 
government exists, and he has rights, a por- 
tion of which he delegates to government, 
that he may protect the rest ; (2) the govern- 
ment possesses the authorities bestowed upon 
it, but is limited by a fixed constitution, 
established by an authority superior to gov- 
ernment; (3) the government is dis- 
tinguished from the state, and is subordinate 
to the state. In some respects we have en- 
tirely lost sight in modern days of the notion 
of the individual antedating the state and 
government ; but the distinction between the 
state on the one hand and the government 
on the other is the most elementary principle 
in the American pohtical system. In the 
sphere of pohtical, as distinguished from 
mere social democracy or spiritual democ- 
racy, it is the first, the most lasting and the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 49 

most powerful contribution of democracy to 
the world. 

The Americans had found a method of 
making a government of their own free will ; 
the constitutional convention, supposed to be 
the possessor of the authority of the people or 
the aggregated individuals, has remained our 
basic institution. They had found a method 
of making real the dreams of philosophers, 
poets, pamphleteers, and rebels of past ages. 
I speak quite soberly when I say that this 
first signal achievement of American phil- 
osophic democracy, this actualizing and 
practicalizing of theory, was the greatest ad- 
dition to politics ever made, unless it be the 
discovery and development of the principle 
of representation itself. 

The thought which I wish to make per- 
fectly plain is this — ^though I weary you by 
repetition: the constitutional convention, a 
representative body charged with the duty 
of framing a government and enabling the 
people to lay down fundamental constitu- 
tional law, is our primary institution. Its 
use demonstrates the origin of government in 
the wishes of the people and makes it clear 



50 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

that government is possessed of authority 
granted to it by its superiors, the people 
themselves. It is, then, the foundation stone 
of democracy as a political system. 

It will not do to pass over the State consti- 
tutions or the methods of their adoption and 
leave the impression that they gave full rec- 
ognition to the political rights of individual 
men. The right of a man to have his voice 
in government simply because he was a man 
was too radical or too advanced for the 
thought of that day. The constitutions, 
therefore, did not provide for universal man- 
hood suffrage ; various restrictions and quali- 
fications were imposed. It would appear at 
first sight that the failure to provide for uni- 
versal manhood suffrage was a complete 
renunciation of the philosophy of the Revo- 
lution and of the very theory on which the 
State constitutions were raised. But the 
contradiction is not so thorough as one might 
think. While it is true that the constitutions 
did not recognize the right of every person 
to vote or to hold office, they did spring from 
the people, they did rest on consent, they did 
accept the primal natural rights of man, they 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 51 

did provide for governments so cheeked and 
balanced as to protect life, liberty, and 
property. 

These restrictions on the suffrage gradu- 
ally gave way in the course of the decades to 
come ; their presence in the early State con- 
stitutions is evidence that, however com- 
plete was the theory of the origin of govern- 
ments in Revolutionary days, practical 
democratic spirit needed to be developed still 
further before universal manhood suffrage 
was established. Later on we shall see some- 
thing of the development of confidence in the 
masses of the people and the consequent 
widening of the suffrage. 

We have seen the deposit of certain prin- 
ciples in the early State constitutions. My 
main purpose has been to make those prin- 
ciples very clear and to show you that they 
were not mere vague theories quite distinct 
from practical politics; they were of more 
than mere passing or temporary interest. 
We still have the philosophy of the American 
Revolution presented to us as if it were en- 
tirely detached; but the truth is, it furnished 
the content for a considerable portion of 



52 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

practical political argument against Britain; 
and it was finally in large measure lived up 
to in the fashioning of American institutions. 
You cannot intelligently approach many of 
the constitutional problems of the present 
day, if you do not know the philosophy of the 
early constitutional system. 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 53 



CHAPTER III 

THE CRITICAL YEARS AFTER 
THE REVOLUTION: THE 
FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 

The years intervening between the sur- 
render at Yorktown (1781) and the adop- 
tion of the Federal Constitution (1788) are 
now commonly called the critical period of 
American history. To understand them 
fully we shall need to remember that, in the 
modern sense of the word, the Revolution 
was not wholly democratic. But the word 
"democratic," which I have not as yet at- 
tempted to analyze, may contain several 
quite distinct meanings, and before we pro- 
ceed further some analysis is necessary. By 
democracy we may mean individualism, the 
purpose and desire of the individual to act 
free from compulsion or restraint; we may 
mean equality, possibly only equality before 
the law, possibly social equality in every par- 
ticular ; we may mean mass government, that 



54 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

form and process of political organization in 
which the body of the people manage their 
own affairs. It is quite apparent that no 
two of these quahties or characteristics are 
necessary concomitants; in fact, individual- 
ism and mass government may prove under 
many circumstances to be mutually antago- 
nistic. 

At the beginning of the Revolution 
American society was simple as compared 
with the society of Europe. There were no 
privileged classes, no expensive and burden- 
some armies and courts, no serfs, no large 
body of ignorant peasants. Eut we should 
mistake if we imagined that life was entirely 
devoid of social distinction and utterly with- 
out stratification. America had imported in 
colonial times some of the distinctions of 
Europe, and hfe in the New World, which 
made for independence and equahty, had by 
no means disposed of the Old World notions 
when the Revolution came. It is difficult, if 
not impossible, to paint a true picture with a 
few bold strokes, for one colony differed 
from another, and one portion of a colony 
from another portion of the same colony. 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 55 

The back country, the frontier region, or the 
part that had just passed through the experi- 
ences of backwoods hfe, was simple in the 
extreme, and there could be found few, if 
any, of the social barriers or the social as- 
sumptions to be found in the older regions — 
among the larger towns and cities of New 
England and in New York or Philadelphia 
or among the tide-water regions of Virginia 
or South Carolina. 

Devereux Jarrat, writing at the beginning 
of the nineteenth century — writing, it may be 
added, with a feeling of regret for the good old 
times — presents the condition of the middle 
eighteenth century in Virginia, and those 
conditions prevailed in some degree from one 
end of the country to the other, North and 
South. Jarrat says: "We were accustomed 
to look upon what were called gentle folks 
as beings of a superior order. For my part, 
I was quite shy of them, and kept off at a 
humble distance. A periwig, in those days, 
was a distinguishing badge of gentle folk; 
and when I saw a man riding the road near 
our house, with a wig on, it would so alarm 
my fears, and give me such a disagreeable 



56 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

feeling, that, I dare say, I would run off, as 
for my life. Such ideas of the difference be- 
tween gentle and simple were, I beheve, uni- 
versal among all of my rank and age." 

The American Revolution was a democra- 
tizing process ; it was a step in the develop- 
ment of democracy. It did not spring from 
the desire of a thoroughly organized public, 
confident of opinion and power. There was 
not as yet a sense of the wholeness of the 
people and their authority. Compared with 
later days, the times were marked by the 
absence of homogeneity and social equality. 
If the governments of 1765 or 1775 or the 
Congresses that spoke for America had been 
subject to an alert intelligent public senti- 
ment ; if the general attitude of the statesmen 
and politicians had been that of acquiescence 
in public desire; if the main body of the 
people in some real collective capacity, even 
though devoid of full political organs, had 
been conscious of themselves as a whole and 
of their compulsive authority; if the indi- 
vidual man, feeling his essential and full 
political equality also had felt responsibility 
— for democracy is much more than protest 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 57 

by an inarticulated mass of humans — ^then 
the American colonies doubtless would have 
broken away from Britain, but the move- 
ment would not have been our Revolution. 
What we call the Revolution was far more 
than breaking the English empire. It 
sprang from the experiences of the Ameri- 
cans in self-government, and it expressed re- 
sentment to external control; but internally, 
within America itself, the upheaval, based 
largely on the principles of individual liberty 
and freedom from restraint under govern- 
ment, was a movement for readjustment, 
marked in some degree by conflicts between 
classes, and it helped to usher in and to make 
more real popular power and popular solidar- 
ity. It made for a unification of the people, 
awakened new social sentiments, gave co- 
herence to popular wishes, prepared the way, 
in other words, for the more fully developed 
democracy that was to come. 

It is so easy for us to be misled, so easy to 
suppose that the democracy in every sense 
of the word appeared in final and authori- 
tative form at the time of the Revolution, 
and that from that day to this we have little 



58 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

by little lost the old faith and the old condi- 
tion, that I must stress my assertion that it 
was the Revolution that made possible the 
later developments of democracy. I have 
already sufficiently emphasized the thought 
that the protection of the rights of the indi- 
vidual from tyrannical use of power was the 
chief political achievement of the Revolu- 
tion; its political product was to deposit, in 
institutions and in authoritative maxims of 
the law, the principles of individual security 
for which men had been strugghng spas- 
modically or longing dimly for ages ; and in 
that respect it marks the culmination of an 
era. Individual liberty was secure, safe at 
least from the grosser forms of governmental 
tyranny. But whatever definition we may 
give to democracy, we now know that it 
means much more than liberty, precious as 
that word once was in American history and 
precious as we may still consider it. And 
the Revolution did something more than in- 
stitutionalize doctrines of individual liberty ; 
it released new energies, brought into opera- 
tion new social forces, helped in breaking 
down class partitions and old-fashioned class 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 59 

prejudices, brought home dimly to the com- 
mon man probably not only a sense of 
security but of responsibility. 

If the thing I have just spoken of could be 
put into a word, it would be the word of John 
Jay that it took time to transform subjects 
into citizens. For after giving just weight 
to the freedom of colonial government and to 
the wide participation of the people in 
political affairs, we must see that matters of 
state were nevertheless in the hands of ruling 
classes, and the common man had not come 
to look upon even his State government as 
his slave and servant rather than his master. 
Some time must pass before the common 
man appreciated what he himself had done, 
what was the work of his own hand, for he 
had in reality done more than chain govern- 
ment — ^he had made it; it was his. If you 
object to this, by saying that, after all, the 
leaders had fashioned the constitutions and 
still held the offices, I could not deny such 
assertion in full; but at the very least the 
government in theory was not superimposed 
or self-created. The developments of democ- 
racy, dependent, of course as always, on 



60 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

social and economic changes, were to be 
marked by a growing sense that government, 
man's own creation, was not to be feared by- 
its creator but utihzed. These developments 
will be noted as we go on, but it took time for 
this most essential quality of democracy to 
show itself. 

In the days after the war individual 
freedom rather than political responsibility 
was most in evidence. We have seen that 
the Revolution in its beginning was conserv- 
ative and preservative; as far as argument 
and doctrine were concerned. Revolutionary 
leaders did not denounce the institutions that 
the past had produced; men gloried, or said 
they did, in the fundamental principles of the 
British constitution and objected to innova- 
tion. But wars, especially revolutions, lead 
naturally to distraction and to revolt against 
established conditions. And so after the 
war we find the Revolution entering upon a 
new phase, in which men questioned the 
validity and worth of the existing order of 
things. People were passing on to more ad- 
vanced and more radical ideas. Those notions 
which afterward came to their full fruitage 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 61 

in the French Revolution displayed them- 
selves after our Revolution: the world had 
drifted away from a state of primeval 
simplicity and bliss into a condition of bond- 
age and unhappiness; nature, in which men 
were free, happy, and unhampered, had dis- 
appeared, and in its place had arisen un- 
natural and unnecessary burdens, trammel- 
ing the soul, body, and spirit of man. Had 
America actually been loaded with the 
weight of European governments, armies, 
privileged classes, and economic impositions, 
this thinking might well have ushered in a 
spasm of revolt and destruction ; but even as 
it was, there were disorders which filled the 
sober-minded with anxiety. At the present 
day we know something of the demoralizing 
effects of war ; or, if you do not like the word 
"demoralizing," we know something of how 
forgotten or half -recognized forces are re- 
leased, and how, as the days go by, the great 
deeps of human passion are stirred. 

In 1776 Tom Paine had written a famous 
pamphlet. Common Sense, with the purpose 
of stimulating the Americans to assert their 
independejace of Britain. And o-f ter the war 



62 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

a good deal of Paine's philosophy was openly 
proclaimed. His aphoristic and brilhant 
style appealed strongly to the intelligence 
and passion of the average man. "The 
palaces of kings," he wrote, "are built on the 
ruins of the bowers of paradise." "Govern- 
ment at its best is a necessary evil." If this 
is so, why not return to the primitive and 
bhssful condition when governments did not 
trouble and the weary were at rest? At the 
very least, if government is an evil, it ought 
to be reduced to a minimum; if men were 
only innocent, there would be no need of 
government at all. Such thinking mighb 
well bring on a new revolution in which men 
would seek to overthrow government and 
base a new system of society on speculation, 
if there were to be any system at all. 

But despite turbulence and disorder in 
some of the States, and uneasiness in all, the 
new revolution did not come. The disorders 
and the vague restlessness did not result in 
the destruction of government; on the con- 
trary, the conservative and propertied classes 
of society were stimulated to reject the 
vague though influential theories that were 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 63 

in the air and to work for a substantial gov- 
ernment. "Good God!" ejaculated Wash- 
ington, speaking of the dangers of the time. 
"Who, besides a Tory, could have foreseen, 
or a Briton predicted them." "We find that 
we are men," wrote Knox, "actual men, 
possessing all the turbulent passions belong- 
ing to that animal, and we must have a gov- 
ernment proper and adequate for him." 
The time had not yet come when men could 
be relied upon quietly and placidly to obey 
the simple laws of peaceful and unoffending 
justice, and instinctively follow their inclina- 
tion to be virtuous, and to seek their own 
good and that of their neighbors. Washing- 
ton was undoubtedly right for that age of the 
world, if not for all, when he said, "Experi- 
ence has taught us that men will not adopt 
and carry into execution measures the best 
calculated for their own good, without inter- 
vention of a coercive power." There is no 
doubt that the uneasiness and the vague 
idealism — products of the war which had dis- 
located the social and the economical order — 
were endangering the institutions of the 
newly formed States, unsetthng the f ounda- 



64 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

tions of those very systems and forms of 
govermnent, which may from our point of 
view have been far from perfect and far from 
the last word in democracy, but certainly 
marked a great stride forward in democratic 
achievement and free political condition. 

The danger that the new liberty would de- 
generate into mere license prompted the con- 
servative elements of society to work for an 
effective national government. Why the 
disorders in the States as separate parts of 
the Union should cause men to turn to the 
need of national organization may not be 
fully apparent ; but men justly believed that, 
even for internal peace, the ''firm league of 
friendship" between the States, the old Con- 
federation, must be strengthened and vital- 
ized. And so, in part because of conditions 
of unrest in the individual States, the Fed- 
eral Convention was summoned (1787) and 
the Federal Constitution was framed to 
promote justice and to secure domestic tran- 
quillity. 

The social unrest and the disorder that 
threatened the stability of State govern- 
ments account for certain portions of the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 65 

Constitution of the United States. It 
authorizes the national government under 
certain circumstances to suppress insur- 
rections; it forbids States to issue bills 
of credit — paper money — or to invalidate 
contracts. These provisions in the Consti- 
tution were not, however, the main purpose 
of the Convention. The members of that 
body believed, as apparently most intelligent 
citizens did, that union was necessary, and 
they believed that the government of the new 
union must have actual authority and powers 
to carry out the ends of its establishment. 

We must see, then, that the great step in 
democratic development after the adoption 
of the State constitutions (1776-1784), was 
the establishment of the federal system. 
Some there will be, of course, who will say 
this was not a step forward but a step back- 
ward. I believe it was a step forward to- 
ward the realization of democracy. But if 
it was not forward, it certainly was of much 
significance in the history of democracy. 
Democracy simply could not go on in iso- 
lated, uncooperative commonwealths; there 
had to be a government of nation-wide au- 



66 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

thority to make treaties, control interstate 
and foreign commerce, settle controversies 
between States, and secure domestic peace. 
In short, for the safety of democracy itself 
there must be a solution of the problem of 
"imperial order" ; and a solution was found 
which provided, not for centralization and 
complete consolidation, but for the mainte- 
nance of the States. The success of democ- 
racy in America depended on the organiza- 
tion of a widely extended union; without 
union based on general authority we should 
have had a number of national States, each 
suspicious of its neighbors, and all in danger 
of conflict and turmoil. Cooperation is the 
very essence of democracy. 

To what extent was the Constitutional 
Convention of 1787 a reactionary body? No 
one can answer that question with a single 
sentence, or probably with many. It cer- 
tainly was not filled with a lofty purpose of 
throwing open to the masses of the people 
fullest opportunity to do what they willed. 
But those that now criticize the Convention 
for not doing this are actually asking for a 
realization of modern democracy and are 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 67 

complaining because the full content of what 
we now call democracy did not then exist. 
Although in the years before 1787 the un- 
fortunate and the distressed clamored for 
relief, and although there were demands that 
the government do something for the poor by 
issuing paper money, it is safe to say never- 
theless that the general idea, high and low, 
was that governments must be restrained lest 
they interfere with life, liberty, and prop- 
erty. Those who exclaim against the fram- 
ers of the Constitution because they did not 
provide for a highly elaborate democratic 
paternalism and establish a government 
quickly responsive to popular wishes, a gov- 
ernment which could and would interfere 
with property, with freedom of contract, and 
with many other freedoms which are named 
in recent discussions, may be right in their 
laments, but are certainly not speaking 
historically. The truth is that the demand 
of those days was for a government that 
could not act beyond certain limits. If the 
average man had been assured in 1788 that 
the new Constitution and the new govern- 
ment gave perfect assurance that he would 



68 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

not be interfered with, his fears would have 
been assuaged completely. It was tyranny 
of overhead government which he feared. 
When the Constitution was presented to the 
States for adoption, it was assailed because it 
did not contain a bill of rights or because in 
other ways it appeared to endanger indi- 
vidual liberty ; men did not complain that it 
prevented the masses of the people from hav- 
ing theii' way and prevented them from con- 
trolhng industry and regulating the use of 
property. 

Furthermore, it is only an exaggeration to 
say that there was not a people — an exagger- 
ation which helps, I think, to bring out the 
truth. There were, of course, many persons, 
some four million, including black slaves ; but 
we mean by the word ''people" much more 
than this; the emergence of a people, con- 
scious, authoritative, self-reliant, was to come 
later in the development of democracy. I 
shall not attempt here the almost hopeless 
task of saying what you and I mean by 
"people." I can only say that one necessity 
of full-fledged democracy is social and 
psychological sohdarity; there must be a 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 69 

certain consciousness or at least the actual 
presence of what may be called common will. 
Those qualities of democracy did not exist, 
or were only beginning to exist, and, in fact, 
were helped into reality by the endeavor to 
build up government, even if that govern- 
ment was to be a government so checked and 
balanced and hampered that it could not 
readily respond to sudden desire. Whatever 
I mean by "people," I do not mean the poor 
or the distressed as distinct from those that 
were not. A democracy, that distinguishes 
into classes those that have property from 
those that have not, is not a full democracy^ 
even if the mass of the poor have full sway 
in pohtics. 

The framers of the Constitution were rich 
men. That fact has been elaborately estab- 
lished by Professor Beard. Government 
even in free America — and free it was in 
almost every respect as compared with 
Europe — ^had always been in the hands of 
the well-to-do. The ownership of property 
was not considered a sin or a social offense 
in those days. From the time of Calvin, not 
poverty and beggarly raiment, but thrift and 



70 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

prosperity were supposed to be evidences of 
divine favor. The Revolution had been be- 
gun and carried through to protect property 
as well as liberty. ''Mr. Locke says," wrote 
Samuel Adams in 1772, "that the secm^ity of 
property is the end for which men enter so- 
ciety ; and I believe Chronus will not deny it ; 
whatever laws, therefore, are made in any 
society, tending to render property insecure 
must be subversive to the end for which men 
prefer society to the state of nature, and con- 
sequently must be subversive of society it- 
self." No one probably will accuse Sam 
Adams of pleading for the spoils of the pred- 
atory rich, for the story is told of his 
friends' having to buy him a suit of clothes 
that he might appear decently clad before the 
Continental Congress. Such primary facts 
as these are often forgotten by those who 
criticize the Constitution. I am not at- 
tempting to defend this respect for wealth, or 
the political theory which tended to support 
and protect property, as ideally perfect; I 
am only giving the facts. 

We must not conclude, however, that there 
was no envy of the rich, or that the rich did 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 71 

not fear the rising tide of restlessness. Some 
persons were anxious because they saw a 
tendency either to bring in a state of unal- 
loyed disorder or to use the State govern- 
ments to attack property and decent private 
liberty. It is always easy to strike off a few 
sweeping generalities in description of a big 
movement, but I shall not allow myself to 
indulge in that agreeable dissipation. An 
examination of the debates of the Convention 
shows so many shades or varieties of opinion 
that a general statement is more than usually 
perilous. Some members believed that 
America was suffering from an excess of 
democracy; and, if Daniel Shays and Luke 
Day and Job Shattuck were democrats, 
America was thus suffering. There was 
little or no belief in the unlimited capacity of 
the plain people to manage their own govern- 
ment. There was a belief in certain natural 
antagonisms between rich and poor and in 
the continuous presence of interests which 
were apt to be in conflict. But that the men 
of the Convention were plotting to sustain 
riches at the expense of poverty or to give the 
rich a peculiar opportunity to oppress the 



72 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

poor is simply not a fact. Faith in the po- 
litical capacity of the great mass of the plain 
people did not exist among the plain people 
themselves. But the great problem before 
the Convention was not to protect riches or 
to hold the masses in check; the task that 
occupied time and attention, the one that 
aroused heated discussion and provoked men 
to anger, was the task of organizing a federal 
state, disposing of the suspicions between the 
existing commonwealths, finding a solution 
of that old problem of imperial order which 
had been vexing men and disturbing political 
equilibrium for a generation. The main 
task, in other words, was to form the United 
States. 

There was no reaction in the Constitution 
itself from the tone and the content of the 
State constitutions. Indeed, when we con- 
sider the experiences of the decade preceding 
the Convention, it is surprising that there 
was not a decided reaction. The Constitu- 
tion did not lay down qualifications for vot- 
ing, leaving that to be decided by the States ; 
and there were no religious or property 
qualifications for office-holding such as the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 73 

State constitutions provided. A provision 
that men should have property to vote or 
that they should be freeholders would not 
have been a severe restriction on the free use 
of the ballot in America a hundred and thirty 
years ago ; but even that restriction was not 
inserted in the Constitution. 

But, it will be said, a large number of the 
members of the Federal Convention were 
owners of public securities. In these days 
possibly it may be looked upon as no mark of 
iniquity that a man owns a Liberty Bond. 
In short, the ownership of securities might 
be a mark of patriotism and faith in the gov- 
ernment quite as much as evidence that a 
person was trafficking in the public securi- 
ties. It may be — who can say? — that such 
ownership tempted men to strive for stable 
national government and is a proof of eco- 
nomic influences in history. But the men 
of most real influence, the real f ramers of the 
Constitution, appear to have held an insig- 
nificant amount of pubhc securities. 

When the Constitution provided for the 
peaceful judicial settlement of controversies 
between two or more States was it a step 



74 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

forward in democracy or only an achieve- 
ment which made a fuller democracy possible 
in the days that were to come? In these 
latter days, when courts are under fire or 
have just emerged from the smoke and din of 
heated public discussion, the truth may be 
obscure or unattractive ; but the calling of the 
judiciary to settle disputes between States 
which had been sovereign and retained, or 
thought they retained, a portion of their 
sovereignty, is a notable fact. I find it hard 
to distinguish between the development of 
the sentiment of democracy and the creation 
of things which made peaceful and respect- 
able democracy possible; but if I may be 
allowed this digression — if it be a digression 
— I will content myself with saying that 
democratic government was on the whole 
\^ furthered by the extensive judicial organiza- 
tion which the new government provided for. 
Democratic States were henceforth to sub- 
mit their disputes to peaceful adjudication. 
This naturally brings up for consideration 
the much-discussed question of the power of 
a court to declare a law unconstitutional. 
This power sometimes has been spoken of as 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 75 

a usurpation, and is to-day often denounced 
as undemocratic because it does not allow the 
people to obtain immediately and without 
restriction everything they may desire. 
''This body was intended," says a recent 
writer, "to enable a small body of jurists, 
nonelected, but appointed for life by an in- 
directly elected President and an indirectly 
elected Senate, to set aside through a nulli- 
fying interpretation or upon the ground of 
unconstitutionality any federal law, ap- 
proved by a majority, as well as any State 
law or State Constitution." Though such a 
statement at first sight appears to be wholly 
true, it certainly conveys a false impression. 
First, it is an open question whether the 
framers expected that the federal courts 
would have the power to declare an act of 
Congress void, though probably they did ex- 
pect it ; second, such a power exercised over 
the States and their constitutions was not 
primarily to safeguard property or give 
privilege, but to preserve the Union, for the 
courts were bound to refuse to recognize as 
valid State acts violating national acts or the 
national Constitution; third, as far as the 



76 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

courts should exercise power at all in the way 
of refusing to recognize acts as good law, 
such power was intended to preserve the 
Constitution, the fundamental law, the 
people's law, and to prevent government 
from interfering with individual liberty; 
fourth, the care of the Federal Constitution 
was assigned primarily to State courts. 

There is no use in trying to understand 
the developments of democracy without see- 
ing its beginnings in opposition to govern- 
ment. In the State constitutions and in the 
Constitution of the United States, the people 
found realization of the old demand for a 
fundamental law which was above and be- 
yond the reach of government ; and the exer- 
cise of this power by the courts was in ac- 
cordance with this belief that, because of the 
peril to human liberty, governments must be 
limited. It is an exact perversion of fact, a 
misinterpretation of the whole historical situ- 
ation, to assert that a few men or a cunning 
minority, when the federal judicial system 
was established, were hunting about for 
obstacles to put in the way of a hungry 
populace. 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 77 

Laws were first declared void by the State 
courts; no State constitution gave such 
power in so many words to the courts. The 
power was exercised by the judges because 
they were determined to regard the State 
constitution as law, simply as law springing 
from a source superior to government and 
thus superior to any act passed by govern- 
ment contravening the constitution. If one 
knows anything at all of the thought and 
activity of past ages; of how men fought 
against tyrannical arbitrary government and 
sought to put restraint upon it in order that 
they might be free or have a larger share of 
liberty; if he knows how philosophers had 
written of fundamental law and the necessity 
of recognizing its full effect in the state; if 
he knows, in short, anything of the develop- 
ment of individual liberty, he will see in this 
power of the courts not a conspiracy against 
democracy, but the culmination of a long 
struggle for liberty against arbitrary govern- 
ment.^ 

^ It should be noticed that I am not asserting that courts 
should exercise this power or denying that they have used it 
too freely; I am saying that if you approach this subject 
historically it should be treated historically 



78 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 



CHAPTER IV 

JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY 

When the new Constitution had been 
adopted and the new government estabhshed, 
the Constitution became ahnost at once a 
battle-ground of argument. There were 
doubtless many who were localists in senti- 
ment without much, if any, national patriot- 
ism. These men on the whole did not, how- 
ever, seek to overthrow the Constitution, but 
rather to resist the extension of govern- 
mental authority. Fundamentally the an- 
tagonism was between those that feared 
strong government and those desiring effec- 
tive administration. Those opposing the 
plans of Hamilton and the growing power 
and capacity of the national government 
were not primarily defenders of State rights 
or State sovereignty for its own sake; they 
were defenders of personal liberty. Their 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 79 

leader, Jefferson, was actually solemnly in 
earnest when he struggled against what he 
considered the monarchical plans of the Fed- 
eralists, and when he objected to the exten- 
sion of executive authority. All the way 
through that decade of opposition, he was 
intent upon saving the people from the 
burdens of elaborate government. He had 
not forgotten or proved false to the senti- 
ments that he had earlier uttered when he 
declared he would as leave have newspapers 
without government as a government with- 
out newspapers — only an extravagant way 
of saying that unrestrained intelligent 
liberty was as good as despotism and ignor- 
ance. 

In the years of Washington's and Adams's 
administrations, that is, in the first twelve 
years after the adoption of the Constitution, 
political parties were forming. Recently 
there has been discussion among scholars and 
radical disagreement as to whether there 
were parties in Washington's administration 
or not. To some extent these differences of 
opinion might be reconciled if there were 
thorough agreement on the definition of a 



80 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

party. But we are safe in saying that parties 
were forming and acquiring consistency. 
Moreover, thoroughly safe is the assertion 
that one of those parties was conservative 
and the other radical; one wished order, 
system, guardianship of property, a care for 
the sober commercial interests of the nation ; 
the other, with a less obvious and tangible 
program, feared the extension of authority 
and was filled with a vague distrust of the 
new government and some of the men that 
held the reins. The difference, as far as it 
was a matter of sentiment or general inclina- 
tion — and it was largely such a matter rather 
than mere opposition to men or measures — 
is best illustrated by the attitude toward the 
French Revolution. To one class of men 
the new freedom of France, all the release 
and the relief that the overthrow of the old 
regime signified, was hailed with joy; to 
others the Revolution bore a sinister aspect ; 
it strengthened and deepened their instinc- 
tive conservatism and heightened their dread 
of the leveling ambitions of the mob. Here 
in America as elsewhere the antithesis was 
that between Tom Paine's Rights of Man 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 81 

and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the 
French Revolution. 

The new government was put into opera- 
tion and guided through its youthful years 
by men of conservative instincts, constructive 
capacity, and administrative skill. It was 
no small task to put the new government on 
its feet and to make it a reality. For that 
work the Federalist party will always de- 
serve approbation from those who continue 
to believe that stable government and a well 
organized Union are requisite even for de- 
veloping democracy and who do not look for- 
ward to a society without government, 
though burdened by newspapers. But when 
all is said we must acknowledge that the con- 
servative party was based on principles of 
political ethics that were soon cast aside and 
that for a hundred years past no one would 
call distinctly American. There was a real 
effort, and for a time a successful effort, 
to manage governmental affairs on the prin- 
ciple of assumed superiority of a ruling class. 
The system and underlying sentiment em- 
bodied the belief that government was safely 
intrusted only to the few, and that the many 



82 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

should be thankful for salutary and efficient 
administration. If the common people 
under satisfactory restrictions would exercise 
their right to choose their rulers, they should 
leave the matter of government to the rulers 
so chosen and not bother their heads about in- 
comprehensible problems of government and 
poUtics. It was all rather British in tone 
and temper than American; and by this, of 
course, I mean it represented a condition 
which obtained in Britain in the eighteenth 
century and through many decades in the 
nineteenth, and it was quite at variance with 
the spirit of the America that by 1800 was 
coming to realization of itself — the America 
that would resent the whole notion of the 
need of guidance by any class of superior 
persons. It is needless to say that the 
system of overhead management soon broke 
down. Never perhaps in our history has 
there been entire absence of management of 
the people by "superiors"; but never after 
1800 was there much, if any, hope for a party 
or a group who allowed this sense of supe- 
riority to be utterly apparent. 

With Jefferson's administration, which be- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 83 

gan with the opening century, we enter upon 
a new era. He always referred to the elec- 
tion that overthrew the Federalists and 
brought in the Republicans as the "Revolu- 
tion of 1800." It is perfectly true that, if 
you scan the government documents, you 
will find no evidence that a marked change 
had come in the repubhc, and that it had 
turned its back on an old order and was fac- 
ing a new dispensation. But Jefferson was 
quite right. The old theory of the Federal- 
ists, which was in practice that of high- 
minded and benevolent toryism, was ban- 
ished never to return in American politics. 
'Not at once were the effects seen, but Jef- 
ferson was the prophet of the coming democ- 
racy, the fully determined, fully armed, fully 
self -trustful democracy of the New World. 
If one should judge a political society by its 
laws alone, one might at times have great dif- 
ficulty in distinguishing between a monarchy 
and a republic; but it is not alone by the 
statute book, but by the countless reactions 
of hfe that one judges of the reality of mon- 
archism and democracy. 

There is an old story that Thomas Jeff er- 



84 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

son, like a simple country gentleman of 
Virginia, rode his horse up to the Capitol, 
tied it to the fence, and walked up to take the 
oath of office as President of the United 
States. Henry Adams in his History has 
proved this legend to be false; but it must 
be preserved because it is an allegory 
more useful and contributory to truth than 
if it were a verified fact. The new era was 
thus ushered in by one who disdained the 
panoply and display of official authority. 
He came as a man from men to enter as the 
servant of the people on the tasks of high 
office. By every criterion, it is true, he was 
himself a gentleman, and it is true that in 
most particulars the new administration was 
not ostentatiously subservient to the masses 
of the people. Some years must still elapse 
before the full power and spirit of American 
democracy was manifest. But Jefferson's 
allegorical appearance at the Capitol 
heralded the day of simple, unassuming 
manners and of unaffected democratic faith. 
It is often more important to know what men 
believe than to know what actually hap- 
pened; it makes no real difference whether 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 85 

Jefferson walked or rode ; the tradition of his 
simple and unostentatious arrival is im- 
portant. 

We are reminded by the learned historian 
of the period, Henry Adams, that perhaps 
dress should never be considered a trifle. 
We cannot, for example, picture Alexander 
Hamilton save as trim, neat, primly and 
almost exquisitely attired; for we think of 
him as the foe of all untidiness and disorder ; 
and George Washington's careful directions, 
which he sent at one time to his London 
agent for the purchase of clothes, assures us 
of what we should otherwise be confident of 
— that this man, vigorous, strong, and inher- 
ently virile as he was, was arrayed with care- 
ful consideration for the dignity of his posi- 
tion and the dignity of himself. Taine tells 
us that about the time of Elizabeth's reign 
the courtiers gave up the shield and two- 
handled sword for the rapier. "A little, 
almost imperceptible fact," he says, "yet 
vast, for it is like the change which, sixty 
years ago, made us give up the sword at 
court to leave our arms swinging about in our 
black coats." 



86 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

The picture, then, of Jefferson, as it has 
been left for us, is of considerable conse- 
quence ; and I allow myself the privilege of 
extended comment because the personahty 
of this man has been of tremendous conse- 
quence in the development of American 
democracy, while around his name have 
gathered legends, principles, and sentiments 
for which he in his own proper person was 
probably only slightly responsible. "Jeffer- 
son is a slender man," wrote Senator Maclay, 
of Pennsylvania ; "has rather the air of stiff- 
ness in his manner. His clothes seem too 
small for him. He sits in a lounging man- 
ner, on one hip commonly, and with one of 
his shoulders elevated much above the other. 
His face has a sunny aspect. His whole 
figure has a loose, shackling air. He had a 
rambling, vacant look, and nothing of that 
firm, collected deportment which I expected 
would dignify the presence of a secretary or 
minister. I looked for gravity, but a laxity 
of manner seemed shed about him. He 
spoke almost without ceasing, but even 
his discourse partook of his personal de- 
meanor. It was loose and rambling; and 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 87 

yet he scattered information wherever he 
went, and some even brilhant sentiments 
sparkled from him." The secretary of the 
British legation described Jefferson as he ap- 
peared a few years later. "He was a tall 
man, with a very red, freckled face and gray, 
neglected hair; his manners good-natured, 
and rather friendly, though he had a some- 
what cynical expression of countenance. He 
wore a blue coat, a thick, gray-colored hairy 
waistcoat, with a red underwaistcoat lapped 
over it, green velveteen breeches with 
pearl buttons, yarn stockings, and slip- 
pers down at the heels — his appearance being 
very much like that of a tall, large-boned 
farmer." 

We can picture this man, who for eight 
years occupied the Presidency, moving about 
the White House in this negligent attire, 
sitting or lounging in an awkward fashion, 
and, despite a certain rustic shyness, talking 
with brilliance and suggestiveness on all 
matters of human interest. In some way, 
we know not just how, he made a deep im- 
pression on the men about him; he was their 
leader, they his intellectual disciples. That 



88 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

he had talent for shrewd pohtical leadership 
and even for a sort of political management 
is true ; but the assertion does not materially 
serve us in understanding the influence of his 
personality. The wealth of his intellectual 
interests, some unexplained charm in his un- 
austere presence, some contagious quality 
that is found in all men who have more than 
mere direct driving power, won men and 
gave them strength. The chief est reason 
for his influence, and the chief est reason for 
our still speaking of Jeffersonian Democ- 
racy, was doubtless the fact that he was in 
the original sense of the word a prophet- — one 
who speaks for another — one who instinc- 
tively represented the spirit, the developing 
spirit, of the masses of the people who were 
as yet but half conscious of themselves and 
but half conscious of their own visions. 

Plis face wore a sunny aspect; querulous 
at times and over sensitive, he nevertheless 
preached and practiced the doctrine of faith. 
It is thus that in the person of Thomas Jef- 
ferson we see the embodiment of certain 
radical and essential elements of any democ- 
racy which deserves the name; for, first and 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 89 

last, his philosophy was the philosophy of 
hope built upon confidence in men and upon 
assurance that if given opportunity they 
would rise to as yet unattained heights. As- 
surance that men were capable of self-gov- 
ernment, or mere reliance, in theory at least, 
on the belief that the main body of the people 
were the safest custodians of power, was not 
the sum and substance of his philosophy; 
he looked forward with a clear and hope- 
ful eye to a developed capacity and a 
recreated strength. If we have grown cold, 
calculating, distrustful, in these modern 
days, questioning the validity of our own 
selves, such was not the mood of the orthodox 
democracy of which Jefferson was the seer. 
The American democracy of the nineteenth 
century may have been assertive, intellectu- 
ally untidy, heedless, and devoid of neat ad- 
ministrative capacity; but it was not be- 
draggled in spirit, sullen, or hopeless. Call 
it what you will, it cannot be denied the 
quality of cheerful confidence. It may have 
speculated and even gambled light-heartedly 
with fate; it may, as Kipling says, have 
matched with destiny for beers; but the 



90 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

democracy that was beginning under Jeffer- 
son's eyes did not lack faith in a benevolent 
future. The face of American democracy 
wore a sunny aspect. 

It is not enough, therefore, to think of 
Jefferson or of Jeffersonism as the spirit of 
individualism. He believed, it is true, in the 
natural force of native vigor which had been 
so long restrained by the complexities of 
elaborate superimposed systems ; he resented 
the heavy hand of government and believed 
men should be free to manage their own 
affairs. The elaborate restraints which ap- 
peared in the social and political order of 
Europe he considered artificial burdens on 
the native desires and instinctive capacities 
of men. But his philosophy was much more 
than negative; it included faith in progress. 
And so, even the word "opportunity," often 
used as the central token of American 
democracy, is not quite sufficient if it signify 
only that men should not be restrained or 
that every one should be given the chance to 
find his own level ; Jeffersonism included be- 
lief in man's moving on to a higher level. It 
was not only the thought that men had the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 91 

right to free action, but faith that the result 
would be progress. 

I do not know anything in Jefferson's 
thought that implies the necessity of 
equality. He believed in the equality of 
such opportunity as men might have if all 
were free and unoppressed; he did not be- 
lieve in a mere unvarying level of attain- 
ment or of social recognition. It may be 
that we apply to him a faith stronger than his 
own words justify; and this is not wholly 
wrong, for any man acquiring leadership has 
always in him more than his exact words 
logically imply. But, rightly or wrongly, 
Jefferson suggests to me an appreciation of 
the creative energy of freedom. It is a 
quaint faith, this faith that freedom is more 
than the negation of restraint, and that in its 
very self it is productive; but if quaint and 
without substantial verification, it is a whole- 
some faith and not altogether without 
foundation. 

It will thus be seen that, by the time Jef- 
ferson came to the Presidency, the people 
had passed or were beginning to pass from 
one condition of democracy to another. It 



92 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

might almost be said that the old condition 
was not democracy but liberty ; it was in the 
main content with ending or nearly ending 
that old struggle of man against govern- 
ment, the contest between liberty and power. 
And if we are thinking at all in the terms 
of modern triumphant though dissatisfied 
democracy, we find that it is by no means an 
intimate associate with mere freedom from 
restraint. Jefferson, it is true, was solicitous 
for liberty, for freedom of thought and ac- 
tion; much of his thinking was directed to 
the task of opposing the development in 
America of an active, expensive and oppres- 
sive government; but with 1800 we certainly 
see signs of the democracy of affirmation, not 
merely negation, the democracy of a growing 
masculine faith, though it was not yet ready 
to express itself in demands for govern- 
mental activity. For the first time we feel 
confident that we are coming into contact 
with more than any theory of governmental 
organization; we find ourselves thinking in 
terms of the spirit of a people. We discover 
those traits of character or the beginning of 
those inherent qualities which were to be 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 93 

more fully manifested in the decades ahead. 
Knowing as we do that in Jefferson's time 
the Constitution was not strictly construed, 
that he purchased Louisiana, that he 
fathered the embargo, that in other ways the 
government actually grew stronger, we may 
think that the democratic revolution of 1800 
had no real significance. To correct this im- 
pression let us turn to the laments of the dis- 
consolate New Englanders, who beheved in 
the Federalist syllogism of "democracy, 
anarchy, despotism." They believed that 
the end of a decent and self-respecting world 
was at hand. "The great object of Jacobin- 
ism," said Theodore D wight, "both in its 
political and moral revolution, is to destroy 
every trace of civilization in the world, and 
to force mankind back into a savage state. 
. . . That is, in plain Enghsh, the greatest 
villain in the community is the fittest person 
to make and execute the laws. Graduated 
by this scale, there can be no doubt that 
Jacobins have the highest quaifications for 
rulers. . . . We have now reached the con- 
summation of democratic blessedness. We 
have a country governed by blockheads and 



94 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

knaves; the ties of marriage with all its 
felicities are severed and destroyed; our 
wives and daughters are thrown into the 
stews; our children are cast into the 
world from the breast and are forgotten ; filial 
piety is extinguished, and our surnames, the 
only mark of distinction among families, are 
abolished. Can imagination paint anything 
more dreadful on this side of hell?"^ Such 
was the wail of the conservatives who 
loathed the prospect of democracy, and who 
believed that to them and men of their ilk 
should be left the task of maintaining order 
and deciding what was good for the people. 
Some writers of recent days have spoken as if 
intolerance were the inevitable mental atti- 
tude of democracy, which must be ignorant, 
narrow-minded, and bigoted. A study of 
autocracy or toryism, the cult of assumed su- 
periority, will show that bigoted intolerance 
is its logical progeny. And this is so because 
an intolerant exclusive democracy is false 
democracy ; whereas true toryism is based on 
the assumption of superiority, on a supposed 

^ Quoted by Henry Adams, History of the United States, 
vol. I, p. 225. 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 95 

monopoly of wisdom, and on a spirit of ex- 
clusiveness shutting out the incursion of 
ideas from without. 

"The obstinacy of the race," says Henry 
Adams, in commenting on the New England 
intellectuals, "was never better shown than 
when, with the sunlight of the nineteenth 
century bursting upon them, these resolute 
sons of granite and ice turned their faces 
from the sight, and smiled in their sardonic 
way at the folly or wickedness of men who 
could pretend to believe the world improved 
because henceforth the ignorant and vicious 
were to rule the United States and govern 
the churches and schools of New England." 
Years had to pass before the more stalwart 
New Englanders looking resolutely and 
hopefully forward, were ready to warm 
themselves in the sunlight of the new 
century. 



96 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 



CHAPTER V 

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY 

So far I have from necessity discussed the 
developments of American democracy with 
not more than shght reference to certain ele- 
mentary things; I have scarcely mentioned 
the natural conditions or the physical en- 
vironment in which the American people 
were living. We must now for a moment 
turn our attention to these fundamental con- 
ditions which were creating and shaping, in 
very marked degree, the character, institu- 
tions, and capacity of the people. They 
owed much to the principles of English 
liberty ; they owed much to their practical ex- 
perience with free or half-free colonial gov- 
ernment; they were influenced by many 
other circumstances of their upbringing in 
America ; but chiefly they were influenced by 
the opportunities of an open continent, by 
the abundance of cheap land, by life in a new 
country where social rigidity could not by 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 97 

the nature of things be scrupulously main- 
tained. While they were changing the wil- 
derness into farms and villages and were ever 
pushing on into the back-country, they were 
creating within themselves qualities that we 
call the essential or characteristic qualities of 
American democracy. This democracy de- 
veloped and asserted itself in a country not 
geographically narrow and restricted, but 
one offering opportunities for expansion and 
tempting men to new enterprises in the 
wilderness. *'The agency," says Godkin,^ 
"which in our opinion gave democracy its 
first great impulse in the United States, 
which has promoted its spread ever since, and 
has contributed to the production of those 
phenomena in American society which 
hostile critics set down as peculiarly demo- 
cratic, was neither the origin of the colonists, 
nor the circumstances under which they came 



^ Godkin, Problems of Modern Democracy, pp. 30, 31. 
The general subject of the influence of the frontier and the 
West has been amply and wisely treated by Professor F. J. 
Turner in his Influence of the Frontier in American 
History, (Annual Report of the American Historical Asso- 
ciation, 1893) ; Rise of the New West, and various other 
articles. 



98 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

to the country, nor their rehgious belief, but 
the great change in the distribution of popu- 
lation, which began soon after the Revolu- 
tion and which continues its operation even 
to the present time." 

Under frontier experiences the American 
democracy developed. Doubtless the very 
extent of the country and the industrial op- 
portunities it offered served in some respects 
to delay the growth of social problems such 
as came to the peoples of Europe before 1860 
and also helped to delay social legislation and 
organization which modern democracy 
craves. Not until after our Civil War did 
we begin to be conscious of the problems 
growing out of complex social structure 
begotten by machinery and the factory 
system; and not, indeed, till toward the end 
of the nineteenth century did those problems 
begin to loom so large and press for solution 
so persistently that the political leaders and 
the main body of the people were thoroughly 
aware of their existence. Almost till the 
beginning of the twentieth century, as we 
shall see later, the sum of social wisdom ap- 
peared to consist of reliance on the freedom, 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 99 

opportunity, and open competition char- 
acteristic of the earlier simple system of 
society. 

What were the natural influences of the 
frontier and how did it shape or create char- 
acter or capacity? A man living on a clear- 
ing in the forest or on an isolated prairie 
farm, intent upon winning a living for his 
family by his own hard work, wresting a live- 
lihood from nature in her untouched primi- 
tive conditions, unaided or unhindered by 
social conventions, naturally develops certain 
qualities and aptitudes, and an attitude to- 
ward life. If in addition we consider the 
very fact of the untamed wilderness and the 
vast opportunities of a continent which 
appeared to offer boundless resources, we 
find those fundamental influences which 
have shaped American society most deeply 
and given it color. We are safe in as- 
suming, especially those of us conver- 
sant with Western hfe of only a few 
decades ago, the intimate connection between 
national character and the American wilder- 
ness ; we are convinced that the frontier had 
a large share in creating the temper of our 



100 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

people and the character of our social and 
political life. 

The frontiersman is and must be self- 
reliant, because there is no one else upon 
whom he can rely. He is an individualist 
in a way, because he depends upon himself 
and naturally resents interference with his 
own particular job, though there is no need 
of a highly developed philosophy of in- 
dividualism because he has no ground in his 
experience for fearing the tyranny of a 
superimposed government or social order. 
He must have deftness and skill in meeting 
emergencies, such emergencies of a practical 
character as arise from his environment ; and 
he must overcome with his own inventions 
and his own vigor the obstacles which nature 
presents to him. He has no conception of 
the problems presented by an intricate and 
complex social order and is prepared to have 
little patience with such perplexities if they 
arise. Technical knowledge in fields of 
human endeavor beyond his own experience 
does not arouse his enthusiasm, especially if 
such knowledge comes from books. What 
he calls "theorizing" is the most useless of 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 101 

occupations. He respects originality, espe- 
cially an originality that enables a man 
to get on with his job, and he pays 
marked deference, thoroughly self-reliant 
and steadily poised though he be, to the self- 
made man, one who has succeeded by dint of 
personal effort, by shrewdness, even by 
"smartness," in doing what he himself and all 
his neighbors are trying to do. He can see 
no fault in his neighbor's becoming rich or 
reasonably well-to-do if the neighbor has 
played the hard rough game fairly. He 
even admires a rude and dominating vigor, a 
rugged strength not altogether gentle in its 
applications, for softness is the one thing he 
instinctively abominates. No particular re- 
spect for traditional habits or conventions 
holds him, because he has left the land of 
tradition behind him; as tradition cannot 
help him, it is promptly forgotten. The 
past means little or nothing to him; the 
future, and the future only, is his. Taine, 
speaking of the men who centuries ago built 
up and defended the old kingdom of Europe, 
points out that such men as had qualities of 
real leadership and possessed physical and 



102 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

mental vigor were the founders of noble 
families. "They had no need of ancestors," 
he says; "they were ancestors themselves." 
So it was with the frontiersmen of America, 
the fomiders of the American States. Not 
respecting tradition, as social questions 
arose, they were ready for the new and un- 
tried ; recognizing themselves as self -created, 
the creatures of no past to which they were 
beholden, they did not realize that they were 
founding traditions and practices of great 
moment for their posterity. Though the 
man of the West, wherever the West might 
be, was thrown on his own resources and 
lived largely apart from men, he was not 
sullen, morose, selfish, or unsociable. 

I have said that the frontiersmen, or those 
just emerged from the most primitive condi- 
tions of the back-country, did not build 
methodically for a future because they recog- 
nized no debt to the past. Everyone, save 
the inevitable shirkers and slackers, was toil- 
ing not simply to live but to get on in the 
world and to better his condition. Inspired 
by what he saw even in the rude beginnings, 
stimulated by the opportunities that lay at 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 103 

his hand, watching the rapid transformation 
of the wilderness into farms and villages, 
glorying in his own power and his own 
freedom, conscious of his own strength, he 
saw visions and dreamed dreams. The 
frontiersman was instinctively an idealist. 
He pictured a coming time, not far remote, 
when the glorious future of his country, his 
town, and his neighborhood, would awaken 
the amazement of an admiring world. The 
lure of the West, which took men away from 
the settled regions and carried them step by 
step across the continent, is one of the strik- 
ing things in American history. Men such 
as these — ^hopeful, self-reliant, idealistic — 
also were naturally self-confident, believing 
in the guidance, not of superior beings, but 
the plain, common sense of plain people who 
lived with realities. The step from self-con- 
fidence and behef in a benign future to boast- 
fulness, based largely on what was to be ac- 
complished, was not a long step. 

Of course the frontier embodied substan- 
tial social equality, as it had left behind all 
the old-fashioned barriers of social freedom 
which the older East inherited in part from 



104 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

Europe. There was in the West a strange 
but not inexphcable mixture of equaUty with 
an appreciation of the fact that one might and 
must take advantage of his opportunities and 
show his own superior skill. His society, in 
other words, had discarded artificial, time- 
worn standards or classifications, but it did 
admit differences of attainment, for the race 
was to the swift and the battle to the strong. 
Even political leadership, provided the 
leader made no assumption of superior intel- 
ligence or erudition, but appeared to embody 
in himself the homely traits of the soil, was 
accepted loyally. There was more than 
willingness to swear undying allegiance to 
"Old Hickory," to "Harry of the West, the 
Millboy of the Slashes," to the "Rail Split- 
ter" — to anyone, indeed, portraying in his 
own success the noble opportunities for any 
manly soul who was willing to fight his own 
fight and raise himself by his own efforts. 
Men saw in such success a justification of 
themselves and their own toil ; they found in 
Western orators and politicians proof of the 
superiority of American life. 

Every portion of the land was at one 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 105 

time or another a frontier; and at no time 
was the influence of frontier hfe without 
effect on the character and activities of the 
people; but not until after the war of 1812 
do we see these frontier characteristics in full 
force. After the war, the emigration from 
the Eastern States into the West was so 
rapid that before 1830 a large portion of the 
people of the nation lived beyond the Ap- 
palachians. If to these persons you add 
those living in the newer sections of the At- 
lantic Coast, you will find that almost half of 
the national population were frontiersmen, 
or had emerged but a short time before from 
the condition of simple life of the frontier. 
To this number should be added those in- 
habitants of the older sections whose condi- 
tion and experience gave them very direct 
and immediate sympathy with the qualities 
produced by backwoods life. 

With the accession of Andrew Jackson to 
the Presidency (1829) we find that American 
democracy had reached self -consciousness. 
What had gone before was only half-hearted, 
or, to be more cautious, not thoroughgoing 
and complete. Now, for a time at least, the 



106 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

doctrines and the spirit of frontier democ- 
racy were dominant in national politics and 
in national character. Jackson was a man 
of the people — a common man of uncommon 
astuteness, a plain man trusting in himself 
but not disassociating himself from others, 
an unsophisticated person indulging in blunt 
simplicity, an unlearned statesman owing 
nothing to colleges, to books, to ancestry, to 
tradition, believing in the capacity of the 
ordinary person to handle the affairs of state 
which ought to be as free from intricacy as 
frontier society itself. 

The scenes at Washington when Jackson 
was inaugurated might as well be described 
by a humble word ; they were not ceremonies, 
they were "goings on." "The President," 
we are told, "was literally pursued by a mot- 
ley concourse of people riding, running 
helter-skelter, striving who would first gain 
admittance into the Executive Mansion, 
where it was understood that refreshments 
were to be distributed. The halls were 
filled with a disorderly rabble scrambling for 
the refreshments designed for the drawing 
rooms, the people forcing their way into the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 107 

saloons, mingling with foreign ministers and 
citizens smTounding the President. China 
and glass to the amount of several thousands 
of dollars were broken in the struggle to get 
at the ices and cakes, though punch and other 
drinkables had been carried out in tubs and 
buckets to the people." 

These unpretentious festivities marked the 
entrance of the demos into full possession of 
its kingdom. The "goings on" were not al- 
together seemly by the standards of so-called 
good society; but no one has ever asserted 
that democracy prided itself on seemliness or 
obedience to other standards than its own — 
least of all a democracy that had just waked 
up, or a frontier democracy that had just 
come into its own. These struggles for the 
ices and cakes meant that there was no spe- 
cial food for ministers of state from which 
the sovereign himself should be barred; and 
there was to be no peculiar place or property 
in which the sovereign people had no share. 
Obediently to this spirit of ownership — of 
proprietorship if not propriety — demand 
was made for the offices — ^the "plums," they 
are called, not ices and cakes — which had too 



108 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

long been in the possession of officeholders 
who thought themselves better than other 
people or were charged with such offenses. 
So the "spoils system" was established, 
partly a protest against supposed exclusive- 
ness of an official class, partly a natural ex- 
pression of the belief that what one has won 
by his own effort rightly belongs to him, 
partly the practical manifestation of political 
equality and the invalidity of the assumption 
that any special knowledge or experience is 
needed for public service. 

The spoils system, we must notice in pass- 
ing, was more than a demonstration that the 
people had come to their own — so contra- 
dictory are the forces of human life ; it was a 
method of financing political parties. And 
so we have this awkward fact : at the moment 
when the plain people were rejoicing over 
the fall of the Bastile and their entrance into 
authority, they were really turning over the 
offices to the magnates of the party to be used 
to reward activity of the party men-at-arms ; 
they were making the office not a place of 
public service but payment for efficient 
partisan warfare. Acclaiming that the gov- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 109 

ernment was now their own, they provided 
resources for the government of the party — 
the party machine — that was often in reahty 
dictatorial, masterful, crafty, and only 
ostensibly popular. If we had full time to 
trace the vicissitudes of American democ- 
racy, we should have to trace the develop- 
ment of party and of party machinery; we 
should have to see various efforts to control 
or democratize the party government; and 
we should have to study the influence of that 
sturdy loyalty to party group, that faithful 
allegiance to one's adopted or inherited 
party, which is one of the most effective and 
perplexing realities in democratic life. How 
can a people be actually self-determining 
when they are swayed by party prejudice, 
party tradition, party machinery? Or, on 
the other hand, can democracies manage to 
exist and grow without these things? Un- 
fortunately, I have not now the time to dis- 
cuss this fascinating problem. 

Jackson, we have said, was the man of the 
people ; but this means more than a humble 
origin or personal popularity with the popu- 
lace. It means two things: (1) The Presi- 



110 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

dent was considered to have a mandate from 
the nation. He alone was chosen from the 
whole, and he was thought to represent the 
whole. He could speak authoritatively for 
the masses of the people. So striking is this, 
so different in real spirit from what had been 
the case before, that we only exaggerate 
when we call Jackson the first President of 
the American people ; in considering him we 
do not think of intricate election devices, 
electoral colleges, State boundaries, or an au- 
thority limited strictly to executing the laws 
of Congress. He was the exponent of a 
fact — the American nation and a popular 
will. All this is but the reverse side of the 
second thing, which is (2) that there was now 
an American people realizing themselves as 
determining authority. 

Jacksonian democracy was not altogether 
unseemly; and, indeed, whether it was or not 
makes little real difference. If there were 
rude assertiveness and ungenteel scramJDle 
and unpleasant cocksureness, there was also 
in a very large measure that sense of self, 
that consciousness of authority, that absence 
of embarrassment, that belief in its own high 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 111 

destiny, without which democracy cannot 
really exist. Moreover, though sedate con- 
servatives of the East stood aghast, and 
many a good New-Englander was only less 
shocked than when Jeffersonism won the 
battle thirty years before, Jacksonian democ- 
racy was national, not sectional; though it 
was frontier democracy, it caught up within 
itself the remnants of f rontierism in the older 
East. Despite the rumblings of slave-hold- 
ing reactionaries in South Carolina, the 
United States was now essentially a united 
nation, an entity, knowing itself, feeling its 
solidarity. 

In the fifty years and more that elapsed 
after the forming of the first State constitu- 
tions, new constitutions had been formed and 
changes had been made in the old. Gradu- 
ally the constitutions had been liberalized, 
and modifications making for greater par- 
ticipation of the people in their own govern- 
ment were provided for. Qualifications for 
the suffrage and for officeholding were 
largely put aside. Moreover, the people not 
only could vote, they did vote ; and this fact 
in itself is a fact of prime importance in 



112 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

the development of American democracy.^ 
When Jackson spoke of the people's will he 
meant much more than could have been in 
the minds of men who framed the Constitu- 
tion : they were careful to safeguard personal 
liberty, but were largely unconscious of this 
vast moral power, this moral entity to whose 
whims and caprices and stern demands an 
obedient official must pay heed. 

How did Jacksonian democracy differ 
from Jeffersonian? It is difficult to say, be- 
cause we can see in Jeffersonian democracy 
something of a prophecy of what was to be. 
Comparisons and contrasts are not, however, 
entirely valueless, though we are in danger 
of making the contrasts too sharp. Only, 
however, by making the contrast sharp and 
strong can I succeed, I think, in bringing be- 
fore the reader the face and figure of the en- 
ergetic and trustful democracy which we 
associate with the personality of Old 
Hickory. 

1. Jefferson was intent upon restraining 



*A study of the figures showing votes cast at election at 
various times from 1789 to 1840 is very illuminating in show- 
ing the growth of democratic interest and responsibility. 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 113 

government, keeping it within narrow limits ; 
Jackson had no fear of governmental au- 
thority. It reposed in his own bosom, and 
the people did not fear their own. 2. Jef- 
ferson was anxious about constitutional re- 
strictions. Jackson perhaps thought he was 
also, but he had no qualms. Mere constitu- 
tionalism did not bulk very large on the 
Jacksonian horizon. The time had not yet 
come when expanding demands of an ever- 
more complex life thrust upon government 
many new obligations ; the times had not yet 
come when people insisted on having efficient 
government that could do things and would 
do them; but the average Jackson just as- 
sumed that the people meant to have their 
way, and the government must obey its 
master. 3. Jefferson, eager for the mainte- 
nance of individual liberty, was solicitous for 
State rights; Jackson did not deny the 
State had rights, but he felt himself the head 
of a united nation. 4. Jefferson had faith 
in the judgment of the people, but his faith 
was really the substance of things hoped for; 
the people had not yet learned to have full 
faith in themselves. Jackson spoke au- 



114 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

thoritatively in the name of a people, who did 
not ask anybody to have faith in them ; they 
had faith in themselves. 5. Jefferson be- 
lieved in progress of men under simple gov- 
ernment toward a noble future; Jackson, a 
true Westerner, believed also in progress, 
but gloried in actual achievements. In both 
Jeff ersonism and Jacksonism there is the be- 
lief in opportunity, but one cannot say that 
Jefferson struggled for equahty, save the 
equality of chance which men might have if 
they were unmolested; in Jackson's time, 
though men, as I have said, recognized 
success and were eager in the struggle for 
advancement, they had cast aside as alto- 
gether unworthy any of the older distinctions 
which still existed in the days of Jefferson. 
And, moreover, there was a large degree of 
actual equality ; during the second quarter of 
the century there was probably, especially 
throughout the Mississippi Valley, a nearer 
approach to full social equality than at any 
other time in our history. 6. Jeff erson would 
not have thought of the unlettered and the 
inexperienced as qualified for the duties of 
office; he could not have imagined, with 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 115 

simple frontier naivete, that affairs of state 
required no expert guidance; but Jackson- 
ism, true to itself and its origins, scouted the 
need of guidance, looked askance at the ex- 
pert, and thought all the voters should do 
was to put one of themselves in office. Jef- 
fersonian democracy was withal decorous, 
though not unargumentative ; Jacksonian 
democracy was rude, strong, vociferous, 
noisy, boastful. The democrats of 1800 
gloried in the hope of a better and finer 
civilization; the men of 1830, though talking 
of what was to be, reveled in their achieve- 
ments, their freedom, their happiness, and 
the superiority of their civilization. 

I have said that democracy of the Jack- 
sonian type was vociferous and boastful; but 
life of those days was much more than merely 
indecorous; in fact, to dwell upon the un- 
seemly qualities of American democracy is to 
make a blunder too often made. The very 
years when Jackson occupied the White 
House were days of varied intellectual ac- 
tivity ; one might say they marked the begin- 
nings of national culture. You cannot speak 
of that quarter century and omit Irving and 



116 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

Emerson and Bancroft and Prescott. You 
cannot forget the younger men, Lowell and 
Holmes and Parkman, who were then 
coming to manhood and to creative power. 
You cannot neglect Webster, and Calhoun, 
and Everett. You cannot pass over those 
years without remembering that Lincoln was 
living, reading his Bible and his Shake- 
speare, and studying his dingy statute books 
amid the scenes of the untutored West. The 
truth is that if America was boisterous, it was 
so partly because it was intensely alive. 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 117 



CHAPTER VI 
SLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY 

In the days of Jacksonian democracy, 
when men were discussing questions of prac- 
tical poHtics — the bank, the tariff, the public 
lands — and when they were boasting of their 
freedom, the problem of Negro slavery be- 
gan to occupy public attention. Perhaps it 
is more nearly correct to say that opposition 
to slavery aroused public interest; at all 
events, though there had been some op- 
position before this time, we can see in the 
fourth decade of the century the beginnings 
of that determined agitation which ended in 
Civil War and the emancipation of the 
blacks. Possibly this movement may appear 
to be quite distinct from the development of 
democracy ; but in reality the attack on slav- 
ery and the upbuilding or the maintenance of 
democracy were closely associated. 

One of the noteworthy things about the 
nineteenth century was the disappearance of 



118 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

slavery, the disappearance of the ownership 
of one man by another; and this, of course, 
indicated a changed attitude of mind, an 
awakened sentiment on the subject of human 
relationships and responsibilities. The cen- 
tury, especially with the beginning of the 
second quarter, was marked by the spread of 
what was termed humanitarianism ; and the 
attack on slavery was a natural and inevit- 
able part of the movement, but only a part. 
In the eighteenth century thousands of 
Negroes were brought from Africa under re- 
volting conditions; and few people stopped 
to consider the inhumanity of the traffic. 
Early in the nineteenth century the slave 
trade was declared piracy, and soon after the 
middle of the century, slavery, except in a 
few half-savage places of the earth, had dis- 
appeared. Thus in the course of a few dec- 
ades an institution as old as the pyramids, or 
far older, disappeared from the world. 

We should first notice that the general 
humanitarian movement was by no means 
solely an American movement ; it showed it- 
self in Europe as well as on this side of the 
water. Furthermore, it was closely associ- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 119 

ated with, or it embodied within itself, the 
fundamental philosophy of developing de- 
mocracy, even political democracy ; it helped 
toward the enlargement of the suffrage, the 
growing appreciation of man's right to self- 
government, and it made for an improve- 
ment in the conditions of labor. The course 
of English history amply illustrates this : the 
Reform Bill of 1832, the Chartist movement, 
the factory laws, and the other efforts to 
rescue the toiler from the terrible burdens of 
modern industrialism, the various move- 
ments for a freer and better colonial system, 
are all parts of the developing recognition of 
human rights and the reality of human 
duties. There was a general trend toward 
social reform, which in succeeding years 
swept strongly onward and has by no means 
spent its force at the present moment. 

In America, beginning about 1830, ap- 
peared various manifestations of this awak- 
ened sentiment; missionary societies were 
provided, new religious organizations came 
into existence, the public school system took 
on new vitality, men discussed and redis- 
cussed problems of human improvement. 



120 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

This general spirit of humanitarianism de- 
serves our special attention, because the 
slavery struggle in America often has been 
studied as if it were not associated with other 
humanitarian movements, as if opposition to 
slavery were disconnected from the general 
movement of the European world, and even 
as if it had nothing to do with democracy in 
its political, social, and economic aspects. 
You cannot split a tendency of the human 
spirit into neatly detached sections. When 
a general impulse is set in motion, or when 
an institution or a social practice is attacked, 
the ethical principles and the social thinking 
involved are sure to show themselves in 
numerous ways. The human mind is too 
nearly a homogeneous whole to work in de- 
tached thought-tight chambers. The threads 
of human motive and desire are likely to be 
woven into a single strand ; and not only the 
individual man but society responds, in 
various undertakings, to the same or similar 
impulses. 

In the fourth decade of the nineteenth 
century, both England and America were 
peculiarly stirred, as I have indicated, by 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 121 

reform movements. "It was a day of ideals 
in every camp," says Morley in his Life of 
Richard Cobden. "The general restless- 
ness was as intense among reflecting con- 
servatives as among reflecting liberals. . . . 
A great wave of humanity, of benevolence, 
of desire for improvement, a great wave of 
social sentiment, in short, poured itself 
among all who had the faculty for large and 
disinterested thinking. . . . The political 
spirit was abroad in the most comprehensive 
sense, the desire of strengthening society by 
adapting it to better ideals and reenriching 
it from new sources of moral power." As 
far as democracy is essentially a spirit of 
human relationship — and that is what it 
chiefly is — ^this sentiment was the sentiment 
of reawakened democracy; it is perfectly 
obvious that this whole humanitarian ideal- 
istic movement, manifesting itself in sundry 
ways — in metaphysics, in demands for prac- 
tical legislation, in plans for the reconstruc- 
tion of society, in efforts of benevolence, in 
acts of compassion — was the root of much 
modern achievement, though ideal humani- 
tarianism still Hngers in the distance. It is 



122 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

the root of the long and maddeningly slow 
effort to introduce a new social morality into 
industry ; it underlies the desire to establish a 
cleaner and better method of handling the 
backward races and of a modified and im- 
proved colonial system ; it furnishes the phil- 
osophy of pohtical liberalism as over against 
close-fisted and stiff-necked conservatism. 

In America this humanitarian movement 
naturally showed itself most clearly in New 
England, where in the thirties and forties 
many people — intellectuals and nonintel- 
lectuals alike — were stirred by visions of 
social change and reconstruction. "But some 
there were, high-flying souls filled with the 
new wine of this idealism, to whom the 
reality of ideas appeared to require that im- 
mediate effect should be given to their ideas ; 
and failing this, that they should refuse all 
participation in an order of things which they 
could not approve. . . . There was an im- 
mense indefinite hope, and there was an as- 
surance that all particular mischiefs were 
speedily coming to an end."^ Read only a 



^ Cabot's Memoir of Emerson, vol. 1, p. 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 123 

few words of Emerson's New England Re- 
formers, and the whole thing will be fairly- 
plain : 

"What a fertility of projects for the salva- 
tion of the world! One apostle thought all 
men should go to farming ; and another that 
no man should buy or sell; that the use of 
money was the cardinal evil; another, that 
the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and 
drink damnation. These made unleavened 
bread, and were foes to the death to 
fermentation. . . . Others assailed particu- 
lar vocations, as that of the lawyer, that 
of the merchant, of the manufacturer, of the 
clergyman, of the scholar. . . . Others de- 
voted themselves to the worrying of churches 
and meetings for public worship; and the 
fertile forms of anti-nomianism among the 
elder puritans seemed to have their match in 
the plenty of the new harvest of reform. 

"With this din of opinions and debate, 
there was a keener scrutiny of institutions 
and domestic life than any we had known, 
there was sincere protesting against existing 
evils, and there were changes of employment 
dictated by consciences. ... A restless, 



124 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

prying, conscientious criticism broke out in 
unexpected quarters. Who gave me the 
money with which I bought my coat ? Why 
should the professional labor and that of the 
counting-house be paid so disproportionately 
to the labor of the porter and wood-sawyer? 
. . . Am I not too protected a person? Is 
there not a wide disparity between the lot of 
me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my 
poor sister?" 

From what has been said it must be ap- 
parent that the abolition movement, which 
began in the earlier thirties, was but one ex- 
pression of the humanitarian movement and 
had its close association with the social-re- 
form thinking of the day. Garrisonian abo- 
litionism, because of the very extravagance 
of its principles, powerfully presented the 
core of the reform tendency. The followers 
of Garrison believed that we should reach out 
for the immediate good, scorn palliations or 
half-way measures, accept no apology for an 
institution on the ground that it had a long 
history behind it, resent the notion of a 
gradual emergence from evil, for "gradual- 
ism in theory is perpetuity in practice," 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 125 

cast out slavery as a sin. Furthermore, with 
this zeal for immediate reform, we find in 
abolitionism two tendencies that appear at 
least in theory to be opposed: one was the 
tendency toward cooperation, mutual help- 
fulness, association; the other was freedom 
of the individual, a freedom brought about 
by breaking all bonds of artificial restraint. 
Such tendencies or principles are seen in the 
various social movements of the time — ^revolt 
against stockish civilization, a freeing of the 
individual, and, on the other hand, the estab- 
lishment of new communities and associa- 
tions. And, after all, is not a good deal of 
this activity, a good deal of this seeming con- 
tradiction, only characteristic of democracy, 
which demands freedom but equally de- 
mands cooperation, united effort, and com- 
panionship ? 

If one reads superficially the utterances of 
Garrison, he may think Lim a simon-pure in- 
dividualist ; he appears to rely in considerable 
measure on the old idea of natural right ; but, 
as a matter of fact, the philosophy of aboli- 
tionism was that of social wholeness. Garri- 
son attacked the Constitution of the United 



126 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

States, deeming it ''a covenant with death 
and an agreement with hell"; the orthodox 
abolitionist refused to vote because the Con- 
stitution, he believed, recognized slavery. 
Nevertheless, the slavery question arose, be- 
cause the United States was a nation and had 
come to a reahzation of its wholeness ; plainly 
and definitely the man of Massachusetts had 
a duty, because men in South Carohna, a 
thousand miles away, held slaves ; opposition 
to slavery as a fact was in part the product of 
a developed national consciousness. And, 
again, though Garrison and his followers ab- 
jured the Constitution and announced there 
should be no union with slaveholders, they 
conceived of a union larger and more com- 
prehensive than the union of the American 
States: "The world is my country," de- 
clared the Liberator. "My countrymen are 
all mankind." This is one of those startling 
manifestations of the strength of a firmly 
held philosophy; for no one can, on prin- 
ciple and by faith, recognize his duty to his 
neighbor without being carried forward, at 
least in his faith, to a recognition of wide, 
perhaps a world-wide, neighborhood. 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 127 

The effect of Garrisonian abolitionism, 
connected as it was in essence with the whole 
stream of humanitarian sentiment, is hard to 
establish. Probably by the violence of its 
attack it aroused bitter antipathy at the 
South and hardened the heart of Pharaoh. 
The refusal to consider means to the desired 
end or to have anything to do with gradual 
abolishment of the evil of slavery may in the 
long run have added to the difficulty of solv- 
ing the slavery problem peacefully. We 
cannot tell. We do know that, though Gar- 
risonian abolitionism was violent and ex- 
travagant, it was a manifestation of a de- 
veloping intention to rid the land of slavery, 
and was part of the humanitarian movement, 
without which democracy would be a hollow 
sham, much farther away from the tasks and 
the imperative duties of the present moment 
than it is. And still, so contrary, so perverse 
are human affairs that this very effort to rid 
the land of slavery, this very sectional strife 
which was engendered, made extremely diffi- 
cult the job of tackling and solving in the 
years to come the thousand and one problems 
of social and industrial betterment. The 



128 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

problems of white labor had to wait, though 
slavery was also a labor problem; and the 
whole program of liberalism and of social 
reform to-day, fifty years and more since the 
emancipation of the Negroes, is complicated 
by the fact that the Democratic party is 
largely a Southern party, and it is dif- 
ficult to form any nation-wide party on 
a clean-cut policy of industrial and social 
progress. 

If American democracy was to de- 
velop and maintain itself, it must banish 
slavery: for slavery was based on force, not 
on consent; it belied the philosophy of de- 
mocracy. No nation that really accepted 
the principle of ownership of man and the 
ownership of labor could, as the years went 
by, develop principles of democracy, inter- 
national duty, or meet high-mindedly the 
problems of social improvement and recon- 
struction as they arose. And so, I say, this 
movement for the abolition of slavery, which 
you may have considered quite disconnected 
with developing democracy, was intimately 
associated with it. It is intimately associated 
not only logically, but by historical attach- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 129 

merits, with the desire of the present day to 
attempt the estabhshment of a world-peace 
on decent and self-respecting international 
conduct, on a recognition of hberty and free- 
dom from malicious assault by the strong 
upon the weak. 

The safety of slavery depended on silence ; 
at least the defenders of slavery believed that 
agitation of the subject endangered its 
safety. It is true that the slaveholders dis- 
cussed the subject continually, and learned 
books and tracts were written to defend the 
system. But they strongly objected to 
verbal attack or criticism by others. This, 
of course, was an inevitable product of the 
nature of the institution. The right to. hold 
people in bondage under the hand of force is 
consistent only with forceful opposition to 
criticism ; a philosophy which scorns consent 
and communication as the basis of a social 
order cannot be expected to welcome discus- 
sion with intention of reaching conclusions as 
the result of argument and interchange of 
opinion. The slaveholders, therefore, ob- 
jected to open discussion, not alone because 
they resented attacks upon their property, 



130 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

but because the whole nature of slaveholding 
philosophy necessarily condemned discussion 
and the meeting of minds for the determina- 
.tion of a fundamental question. This ac- 
counts for the torrents of abuse and pas- 
sionate denunciation poured out on Garri- 
son and the whole antislavery cause at the 
North. 

The attempts to prevent discussion in 
Congress and to shut out abolition matter 
from the mails amply disclosed the contradic- 
tion between slaveholding philosophy and 
free institutions. The "gag laws," directed 
against the presentation of antislavery peti- 
tions, increased rather than diminished atten- 
tion to the whole subject in the country at 
large, and, probably, even in Congress itself. 
Calhoun, as usual seeing things as they were 
with remarkable clearness, dreaded the de- 
velopment of a public sentiment at the 
North ; he realized that, if a public sentiment 
on a distinct moral question were created by 
discussion, slavery was endangered and per- 
haps doomed or the Union would be shat- 
tered. Now, there can be no democracy 
without freedom of public discussion; and 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 131 

there can be no democracy without the free 
opportunity of creating moral judgments by 
interchange of opinion. Thus slavery was 
not only contrary to democracy because by it 
black men were held in bondage, but also be- 
cause it demanded silence, made war on the 
elementary life-principles of a free state 
which can exist only when there are f acihties 
for forming common public opinion. One 
cannot well overestimate, therefore, the sig- 
nificance of this rising controversy; it was 
preeminently a controversy between the very 
life of democracy itself and the life of an 
autocratic system, which could exist only if 
the elements of democratic character were 
crushed out in the nation as a whole. Long 
before Abraham Lincoln announced that the 
nation could not long exist half-slave and 
half-free, that it must become either the one 
thing or the other, the fundamental ethical 
principles of democracy and slaveholding 
were at war, and only one could survive if 
the nation remained a nation. Notice that I 
am asserting not only that slavery kept some 
millions of blacks from democratic citizen- 
ship, but also that the philosophy on which 



132 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

slaveholding rested must be acquiesced in by 
the nation if slavery was to be safe. The 
North must adopt silence and the whole 
principle on which silence rested. The 
North must surrender the principle of open 
discussion on pubhc affairs, the forming of a 
political and social morahty by interchange 
of opinion, the principle of popular govern- 
ment and democracy. 

The development of slaveholding phil- 
osophy will make all this more clear, and as 
we see this, we shall see how the slavery con- 
test, which ended in the Civil War, was a 
contest between two principles of hf e affect- 
ing the whole nation. I have attempted to 
illustrate before how the philosophy of aboh- 
tion was but a part of the philosophy of 
human relationships which was exhibiting 
itself in many of the activities and ambitions 
of men. But democracy had as yet no 
thoroughly worked out philosophy, unless we 
accept the old philosophy of natural rights 
and of the absolute man ; democracy has been 
with us, as it should be, I imagine, a matter 
of experiences and of growth as society de- 
veloped. Furthermore, before 1830 there 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 133 

was in this country no systematic and clearly 
formulated philosophy of slavery. Up to 
that time the South had regretted the exist- 
ence of the institution which had gradually 
been weaving its coils about the whole social 
and industrial hfe of the section. The first 
person to outline the philosophy with any 
thoroughness was Thomas R. Dew, profes- 
sor in William and Mary College. He con- 
tended that slavery was the normal condition 
of the majority of men, that prosperity and 
civilization rested on slavery. All this talk 
about natural equality of men was mere rub- 
bish at the best; the common herd should moil 
and toil that the men and women of superior 
caste might rise to heights of elegant leisure 
and create noble works of art and literature. 
"Few greater blows," says Professor Dodd, 
''have ever been struck at democracy in the 
United States than this argument of an able 
and trusted teacher and scientist. The Vir- 
ginians, at the point of beginning a pohcy 
of emancipation, turned their backs upon 
democracy and henceforth discounted their 
great historical leader [Jefferson]. They 
accepted a new social faith, which, as they 



134 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

said, was more consistent with the facts of 
hfe."^ 

While these theories of social order were 
primarily or ostensibly directed toward the 
maintenance of Negro slavery, they, of 
course, were intended to be principles of uni- 
versal application. The world and the full- 
ness thereof existed for the benefit of the 
select few ; and they should banish altogether 
as maudlin and false all this sentimental talk 
about the rights of men as men to a higher 
and freer participation in the affairs of state 
and a wider and deeper participation in the 
comforts and pleasures of a developing 
civilization. As superintendence and direc- 
tion were for white men in the South, and as 
labor was for the black men and the poorer 
whites, so at the North, if this philosophy 
prevailed, labor should be the lot of the 
laborer, while guidance and refined enjoy- 



^ A very interesting and learned presentation appears in 
"The Social Philosophy of the Old South," American Journal 
of Sociology, vol. xxiii, pp. 735-746, by Professor William E. 
Dodd. Quotation above is from p. 737. Chancellor Harper 
asserted, "The exclusive owners of property ever have been, 
ever will, and perhaps ever ought to be the virtual rulers 
of mankind." 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 135 

ment should be the burden of the superior 
classes. 

The foundation of this doctrine was, of 
course, that property was to rule: in the 
South, the capitalist, fortunate in having 
members of another race for the great body 
of menial toilers, could own the body of the 
laborer. It is almost refreshing to see the 
unadorned presentation of this whole phil- 
osophy of property as over against hu- 
manity. The thinking is so absolutely "un- 
humanitarian," so cold, so straightforward, 
so devoid of shuffling or subterfuge, that one 
can hardly complain of unfair play. There 
is the argument ; do not bandy with it, take it 
or leave it : the thing to do is to keep the toiler 
in his place, ignorant because he has no need 
of education, free from temptation to climb 
because climbing will but injure him and the 
social caste into which he may attempt to 
clamber; the workingman of Britain or the 
North is in a condition worse than slavery be- 
cause the slave being property is cared for as 
property; unhappy the land in which prop- 
erty is not made secure and civilization not 
stabilized by subjection of labor to capital. 



136 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

It is plain that to preserve this most desir- 
able stratification of society, every effort 
must be made to hold power in the hands of 
superior beings. Naturally, the militaristic 
doctrines found lodgment. Members of a 
ruling caste take with perfect aptitude to a 
militaristic regime. Of course there was not 
developed at the South that thoroughgoing 
militaristic plan and principle which was 
getting its stranglehold upon Germany and 
which in our day has brought unspeakable 
ruin on the world; but no one can read the 
arguments for aristocracy built on slave 
labor and stratified society without seeing in 
all their perfect and shapely nakedness the 
philosophic members of the argument for 
Machtpolitik and militaristic overlordship. 
I do not mean that the slaveholding regime 
was consciously and knowingly militaristic; 
but only that slaveholding, like militarism, 
rests on force, and that before 1860 the very 
nature of slavery was developing the prin- 
ciple of force. 

The main argument of Calhoun was not so 
directly and brazenly an argument for 
slavery, per se, as it was an argument for the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 137 

maintenance of black slavery because of the 
diversity of the races. But by the logic of 
the situation even Calhoun was forced to give 
support to the principles which Dew and 
Harper most fully presented: "There never 
has yet existed," he said, "a wealthy and 
civilized society in which one portion of the 
community did not in point of fact live on the 
labor of the other." Furthermore, Calhoun's 
later political theory was all based on opposi- 
tion to majority rule; instead of upholding 
what Jefferson called the vital principle of 
republics as opposed to force, the vital 
principle of despotism, he elaborated with 
astonishing skill a series of abstruse theo- 
retical principles to justify the right of the 
minority to protect itself against intrusion; 
mere government by weight of numbers he 
repudiated vigorously and with astonishing 
cleverness. While this argument was created 
for the protection of slavery in a nation 
where the slaveholders were greatly outnum- 
bered, he cited with approval those devices in 
South Carolina which had been used to pro- 
tect the few against the many, and, of course, 
his whole dissertation is against the propriety 



138 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

of a government which governs solely in ac- 
cordance with the wishes of the masses of the 
people. 

There is no more interesting or pathetic 
figure in American history than Calhoun. 
A man of extraordinary mental capacity, he 
gave the full force of his great intellect and 
character to the defense of a doomed cause — 
slavery. Slavery could be protected only by 
the South's shutting itself from the currents 
of nineteenth-century life ; the forces of civil- 
ization were arrayed against the maintenance 
of any "peculiar institution." He was caught 
up in a contradiction which seemed to make 
imperative (1) the existence of slavery as a 
local institution with which the North or 
other parts of the world had no right to 
meddle, and (2) the need of other people's 
accepting the philosophy of slavery and of 
minority rule. 

That Calhoun's theories, finely spun and 
wondrously elaborated, were really woven 
into a clever fabric for the protection of 
propertied interests hardly needs to be 
pointed out. In this case the property ques- 
tion was complicated by the fact that the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 139 

owner was white and the property black ; but 
withal behind the argument for slavery were 
vast property interests, the holders of which 
had a thorough understanding, and on one 
plea or another were prepared to go any 
length to defend their possessions. The very 
extravagance of their positions and the very 
extremity of their needs furnish a brilliant 
illustration of the way in which selfish inter- 
ests may create a philosophy and threaten 
the state ; and as the antithesis between slave- 
holding and humanitarianism was so patent, 
so shocking, so obvious, it enables us to see 
other situations and problems of like char- 
acter, where the conflict is not so obvious.^ 
Doubtless there is always danger and always 

^ Of course I do not mean to assert that all Southerners 
were cruel and inhumane. Calhoun was instinctively humane 
and gentle, and I have no doubt Dew and Harper were. But 
there stands their philosophy, and before 1860 it had many 
followers. We often find in life gentle and refined people 
who tolerate a system of industrial or social intolerance which 
one would expect them to reject. I shrink, indeed, from 
describing the philosophy of slaveholding, lest I appear to be 
heaping objurgation on the South; of that we have had more 
than enough. One ought to be allowed to attack evils in an 
industrial and social system without being charged with 
attacking the conscience and the character of all that are 
caught up and entangled in the system. 



140 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

a struggle, danger that those flourishing un- 
der a given order of society and content with 
its rigidity will seek to entrench themselves 
and develop political and social theory for 
their defenses, while the discontented will 
become more discontented and batter at the 
barricades of their opponents. The struggle 
may be, probably will be, more or less con- 
tinuous ; but, despite the vicissitudes and the 
disappointments of modern democracy, we 
must beheve, if we believe in democracy, 
that adjustments will come through discus- 
sion and not by force. 

It is plain enough that the very founda- 
tions of democracy were involved in the 
whole slavery contest, not alone, let me say 
again, simply because it hardly can be demo- 
cratic to hold men in bondage as property, 
but because the whole philosophy of slavery 
was at war with the philosophy of freedom 
and democracy. The thinking which would 
justify the white man in owning the black 
man, justified and exalted a system of so- 
ciety in which the many toiled for the few, 
in which the minority had privilege and 
power and unchanging protection, in which 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 141 

education and discussion and free exchange 
of opinion were at the best for the elect alone, 
in which, as the minority must protect itself, 
military authority must be in the hands of the 
superior beings who alone were capable of 
managing the affairs of state. It is discon- 
certing to discover in how many different and 
yet similar guises the right of the superior to 
manage and control the inferior, this right 
based on some assumed basis for separate 
superiority, this right of the lesser number to 
control the destinies of the larger, comes to 
light even in modern history. 

Illuminating as is the whole philosophy of 
slaveholding, it is especially so when one re- 
members that it was directly opposed to the 
philosophy of abolitionism and of humani- 
tarianism, and when one sees that this highly 
developed theory was worked out in the very 
decade when humanitarianism was exhibiting 
itself most strikingly, especially in the 
Northern American States and Britain. 
Here were two directly antithetical attitudes 
toward life and duty, and the result of the 
antithesis was a great war, in which slave- 
holding was beaten down; it had to go if 



142 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

democracy, a principle of human intercourse 
based on freedom and fellowship, was to sur- 
vive and enter upon new duties and new en- 
larging experiences. 

All this, of course, leads us up to the Civil 
War and its significance. The development 
of antislavery sentiment at the North is a 
very difficult course to trace. It is hard to 
account for the transition in twenty years or 
so from the time when Garrison's hfe was in 
danger and when the question of slavery did 
not trouble the even plane of orthodox re- 
ligion in the Northern States to the time 
when Wendell Phillips was a popular idol 
and Charles Sumner a popular leader, and 
when churches were divided into Northern 
and Southern branches because of the slavery 
issue. That transition, momentous, per- 
plexing, meaning so much that was fateful 
in our history, I shall not attempt to trace. 
The developing spirit was doubtless con- 
nected with the growth of national sentiment 
throughout the North, doubtless strength- 
ened by the incursion of free laborers from 
Europe, doubtless aided by the widening and 
deepening social hfe of the Northwest which 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 143 

was preparing to add its vigor to the con- 
science of the plain people of New England. 
At all events the Civil War came on, 
slavery was abolished, and the nation was 
saved. Let us look for a moment into what 
was involved in the controversy and then see 
what was its effect. It is plain, of course, 
from what has been said before, that the issue 
was between principles of democracy and 
those principles of slaveholding which were 
directly opposed to the whole philosophy of 
democracy. The average man at the North 
believed the war was for the Union, to save 
the country from dissolution, and so it was; 
but the fate of the country was in reality of 
especial significance because on it depended 
the fate of democratic experiment. The 
United States stood out before the world as 
the one conspicuous effort at popular gov- 
ernment. Was the country to be torn asun- 
der because a section beaten in an election 
after twenty years and more of discussion 
would not accept the constitutional decision 
of the electorate? We have only to think of 
what would have resulted from the triumph 
of the principle of secession to see what was 



144 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

the significance of the war. Two differing 
social and industrial systems would have ex- 
isted facing each other across the Ohio and 
a surveyor's line in the West — two intrinsi- 
cally hostile systems. Moreover, the break-up 
of the Union would have been hailed by con- 
servative classes the world over as a demon- 
stration of the incompetence of democracy 
as a basis of national organization. These 
two systems hardly could have maintained 
themselves peaceably ; they would have been 
vexed continually by all the old problems 
of industrial diversity and fugitive slaves. 
Other wars surely would have followed and 
in the intervals a militaristic system would 
have been established. But all this simply 
shows us that the conflict was really, as 
Seward proclaimed, an irrepressible conflict, 
and that this continent must be either one 
thing or the other, either all free or all slave. 
The contest, as both Seward and Lincoln 
maintained, was the age-old contest between 
privilege and freedom, between the claims of 
the few to power and ease and the right of 
the many to eat the bread earned by their 
own labor, a contest which perhaps never will 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 145 

disappear. Lincoln clearly saw the nature 
of the conflict : it was a conflict to determine 
whether democracy as a form of government 
and a principle of life should survive. 



146 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 



CHAPTER VII 

DEVELOPMENTS OF RECENT 
YEARS: INDIVIDUALISM VS. 
SOCIAL CONTROL 

It is difficult to analyze or to describe 
briefly the fifty years and more that have 
passed since the end of the Civil War. In 
that half century the population of the 
United States trebled ; immigrants came into 
the country by the million; in 1860 all the 
Western country between the western hne 
of Iowa and the Rockies was almost un- 
peopled; the mountain regions were prac- 
tically without inhabitants. In one decade, 
1870 to 1880, a territory equal to that of 
France was added to the farms of the nation, 
while in the next two decades the total area 
of farm lands taken up constituted a terri- 
tory as large as France, England, Wales, 
and Germany combined. Towns and vil- 
lages became cities; industries developed to 
enormous proportions; a few men amassed 
vast fortunes and the wealth of the land in- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 147 

creased amazingly; because of machinery 
and the building of railroads, many lines of 
business were concentrated in manufactur- 
ing centers; new problems begotten by 
wealth and poverty demanded solution; 
workmen began to talk about classes of so- 
ciety, while conflicts between labor and 
capital assumed at times alarming propor- 
tions ; the growing complexity of society ac- 
centuated the interdependence of various 
portions of the country and its essential in- 
dustrial unity, and also that government in 
the nation, the State, and the city must take 
on a multitude of duties unthought of in the 
simpler life of the days before the war. 
Democracy as a form of government was 
thus put to new tests because it was called to 
new duties. It had succeeded in the less 
intricate life of earlier days. Could it take 
on the new tasks and show itself efficient, 
economical, and just? Could our constitu- 
tional systems, arranged and established in 
more primitive times, be adapted to the new 
situation? 

We shall have to content ourselves with 
only a brief discussion of the democratic de- 



148 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

velopments and trials during that half 
century of growth, and we can only partly 
answer the questions that I have stated. 
Even the presentation of the problems is, 
however, of some value. 

The first ten or fifteen years after the war 
were largely taken up with discussing the 
problems and cherishing the animosities of 
Reconstruction. We now look back on those 
years with some sinking of the heart. The 
South was a scene of industrial and social 
confusion. Slavery in its more evident forms 
had been put away forever ; but you need not 
be told that the effort made by the North to 
force Negro suffrage on the South, despite 
the amendments to the Constitution, was not 
a practical success ; the effort to secure sub- 
stantial equality for the Negro was likewise 
largely a failure. The whole matter was full 
of difficulties for Northerner and Southerner 
ahke; but it is especially depressing to find 
how much of the thought and passions of 
men here at the North was given to revenge- 
ful or suspicious partisan politics, how little 
to finding, on the basis of enlightenment, 
some solutions for the pressing problems, 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 149 

which men as mere poHticians could not dis- 
cern. Of course the race question itself was 
full of perplexity, and it remains with us 
to-day, a question to be answered if possible 
by the mandates of democratic justice. In 
America and in the world at large, beneath 
the task of making and preserving democ- 
racy, rests the fact of diversity of races, of 
race prejudices and of race ambitions. 

The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) was 
partly the product of partisanship, though 
not altogether unworthy partisanship. The 
Southern Democrats, the Republicans 
thought, should not have the advantage of 
increased State representation in Congress 
as the result of emancipation of the blacks. 
So the amendment provided that a reduction 
of representation should follow any denial of 
the suffrage to male citizens twenty-one 
years of age. The Fifteenth Amendment 
(1870) declared that suffrage should not be 
denied on account of race, color, or previous 
condition of servitude. I mention these 
efforts here only for the purpose of indicat- 
ing that the old belief in freedom and re- 
sponsibility was still active. Charles Sum- 



150 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

ner and his school beheved that the f reedman 
was fit to vote and, moreover, that liberty 
and responsibility would add to his man- 
hood ; they continued to cherish the idealism 
which had been the uplifting force of the 
antislavery movement — the belief that free- 
dom was the panacea for social ills. 

Now, it is a strange and disconcerting fact 
that this belief in freedom was prominent at 
a time when society, as we have just noticed, 
was passing on to a new stage. Society was 
becoming more complex ; the old ideas of un- 
restrained liberty, the notion that all would 
be well if government did not govern too 
much, were being invalidated by new needs ; 
the time was coming when men needed to 
have things done for them which they could 
not do themselves, and when restraints on 
individual action were demanded. The time 
was close at hand when government must 
control the use of property. The old theory 
of laissez-faire^ of everybody for himself in 
the business world and the devil take the 
hindmost, was being discredited and was soon 
to appear unworkable. As one reads 
through the Congressional debates of those 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 151 

days when the Fourteenth Amendment was 
under discussion, he is depressed by the 
volume of sound poured out in denunciation 
of the "Rebels" and by the slight attention 
given to the provisions of the Amendment 
that were to be of great significance in the 
days that were just ahead. 

The first section of the Amendment pro- 
vides that no State shall deprive a person of 
his life, liberty, or property without due 
process of law, or deny to any person the 
equal protection of the law. The State 
constitutions commonly contained provisions 
of like character. But it is noteworthy that 
the Fourteenth Amendment protected in- 
dividual liberty from infringement by the 
States; personal liberty was placed under 
national protection. Though the framers 
of the Amendment had chiefly in mind the 
protection of the Negroes, the words are gen- 
eral in their import; they do not refer to 
black men and freedmen alone. As the na- 
tional Constitution now contained explicit 
protection of individual rights, every piece of 
State legislation that could be interpreted as 
an encroachment on personal liberty, on the 



152 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

right of every man to do as he chose, might 
be checked by national authority or brought 
before the Federal Court for examination. 

Hardly was the Amendment passed, when 
difficult questions of interpretation arose; 
indeed, difficult questions continued to arise, 
because, as we have said, the times were de- 
manding greater governmental activity ; dis- 
content with the old notion that all would be 
well if only men were left alone was begin- 
ning to manifest itself. On the other hand, 
corporations and individual owners of prop- 
erty, busily engaged in industry, some of 
them occupied with tasks that affected wide 
areas and many thousands of people, wanted 
to be left quite free to manage their own busi- 
ness and reap their own rewards. The belief 
that men should be left alone was all right 
enough in simpler times, before the building 
of great factories and before long railway 
systems knit people in wide regions into a 
single body, when much that people ate was 
raised in the immediate neighborhood, when 
much that they wore was made in the house- 
hold or by the village tailor or shoemaker, 
when much that was used and all that was 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 153 

mended depended on the cleverness of the 
village tinker. But the new life was begin- 
ning to undermine local independence and 
the power of any man to live for him- 
self alone and supply his own wants. What 
was meant, then, by a declaration that no 
State should deprive a person of life, liberty, 
or property without due process of law? 
Was a corporation a person? What was the 
content and the extent of liberty? Did 
property include profits from property, or 
could rates and charges be fixed and regu- 
lated, and if so, under what conditions? A 
study of the disputes arising under the first 
section of the Fourteenth Amendment dis- 
closes the nature of the industrial and gen- 
eral social problems of democracy in these 
decades of rapid change and rapid develop- 
ment. 

Fortunately, at an early date the Supreme 
Court decided that the States were not by the 
Amendment deprived of the police power; 
that is to say, the broad power of controUing 
individual action and regulating the use of 
property to secure the life, health, and safety 
of the people. But, of course, the question 



154 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

arose as to what was a due exercise of the 
poHce power. How far could State legisla- 
tion go, under guise of using the police 
power, in the way of controlUng men in their 
use of property? We must always remem- 
ber that we in America always had boasted 
of the advantage of having governments that 
did not meddle ; and we prided ourselves, not 
unjustly, on our ability to get on without 
annoying interferences. So legal contro- 
versies arose, and little by little principles, 
adapted to the new order, were laid down. 
We must consider all this discussion and the 
building up of new law as the product of a 
democracy endeavoring to solve the problems 
of a new social and industrial era. 

As railways reached out over the Western 
country tying up the whole Middle West 
into an industrial unit, and as farms 
stretched out over the northern Mississippi 
basin, the farmers grew uneasy and de- 
manded regulation of railway rates and ele- 
vator charges. They felt that they were sub- 
ject to the will of a few men controlhng es- 
sential industrial agencies and occupying 
strategical positions. Answering this de- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 155 

mand of the Grangers, various laws were 
passed, and these, of course, came before the 
courts, that their validity might be tested,. 
"What right has a State Legislature to regu- 
late charges?" said the railway owners. 
"What right have you," said the owners of 
grain elevators, "to say how much we shall 
charge for storing grain? This property is 
ours, and no one can limit the profits we 
reap except by taking away our property 
without due process." But the courts up- 
held the authority of the State to do these 
things, and in doing so laid down, in 
the elevator case, a very important prin- 
ciple, namely, that when property is de- 
voted to a public use it is affected with a pub- 
lic interest and the public has an interest in 
that use. This principle formed the basis for 
the body of legislation that was to come, regu- 
lating and controlling corporations that are 
of quasi-public character.^ The courts did 

^ Of course railroads might be regulated on a somewhat 
different principle, because they receive certain privileges 
from the State. But the general principle that a business 
may, though privately owned, be so essentially public in 
nature as to warrant regulation of rates is a very important 
principle. 



156 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

not, however, acknowledge the full right of 
the State Legislatures to fix rates, but re- 
served to themselves the authority to deny the 
validity of any rates that were so unreason- 
ably low as to be practically a confiscation of 
property. No one now questions the right 
and the duty of the government to regulate 
railroads. Times have changed since men in 
control of railway systems indignantly de- 
nied that the public had any business to inter- 
fere with the management of their property. 
Gradually they came to recognize that they 
are public servants. 

It is unnecessary to remind ourselves, per- 
haps, that all this new adjustment, all this 
growth of public control, all these new 
burdens of democratic responsibility, had to 
be worked out here in America under writ- 
ten constitutions; and these constitutions 
sought to preserve individual liberty and in 
a measure to restrain government. It was 
necessary in this country, as in Britain, to 
bring about a change of mind, to determine 
what was wise and proper, to seek solutions 
for new problems ; but in addition all Ameri- 
can legislation had to be squared with the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 157 

prohibitions and commands of written con- 
stitutions. To be rid of the old theory of 
individual right and at the same time pre- 
serve constitutional limitation, or, rather, to 
preserve what needed to be preserved of in- 
dividual right, to preserve the Constitution 
and at the same time meet the new needs of 
the day, was a difficult task. This process of 
adjustment, this enlargement of the prin- 
ciples of constitutional law, often sorely 
tried the impatient reformer. But I think it 
fair to say that the courts, though sometimes 
unwisely technical, on the whole succeeded 
with remarkable cleverness in maintain- 
ing constitutional principles while they 
recognized the validity of new social legisla- 
tion. And this I say despite the fact that 
the courts have been the chief mark of attack 
from those that would hastily accomplish 
what they deem desirable. It may be that, 
in time to come, the people will demand that 
written constitutions, as far as they restrain 
governmental authority, be scrapped alto- 
gether ; it may be that the courts will be de- 
prived of the job of passing on the question 
as to whether legislation is in accord with a 



158 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

constitution superior to ordinary laws. But 
that time is not yet. 

Possibly of even greater consequence than 
legislation regulating railroads and other 
corporations are the laws for the protection 
of the workingman. This class of legislation 
has come chiefly in the last twenty-five years. 
Laws have been passed limiting the hours of 
labor and also laws providing that employers 
should give certain compensation for in- 
juries suffered by workmen. This legisla- 
tion, of course, had to pass through the 
judicial gantlet; for here again an old 
"liberty" appeared to be infringed upon. 
What right has any Legislature to limit my 
power of contracting with laborers in my 
factory? Or why should a law prevent a 
man or woman from working more than ten 
hours a day when he is willing to toil for 
twelve ? 

This demand for legislation restricting the 
absolute freedom of contract grew out of the 
fact that practically there was not real 
freedom, especially for the workman. It 
was easy enough to say that, if he did not like 
the hours of labor, he need not work, or to say 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 159 

that if he did not wish to accept the risks of a 
certain employment, he could seek some 
other employment. As a matter of cold 
fact, the laborer was not free, except in the 
view of the law, to move hither and thither, 
or to accept or reject employment. And so 
the State stepped in to announce that em- 
ployers must provide safe appliances, assume 
the risks of the employment as one of the 
burdens of business, and for the public good 
protect the public and the working people 
from long hours and unnecessarily exhaust- 
ing labor. 

In passing upon this legislation the courts, 
struggling up and away from the old idea of 
democracy, away from the belief that all 
would be well if government kept its hands 
off, reached a social point of view and 
adopted the principles of the new social 
democracy. But they did not declare that 
individual rights of employer and laborer are 
henceforth subject to any and every legis- 
lative act that may be passed: laws encroach- 
ing on the old freedom of contract must be 
judged by a wholesome social standard; the 
validity of such legislation must depend on 



160 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

some apparent social need. Granted that 
there is to be any restraint on the free exer- 
cise of majority power, the requirement that 
there be some reasonable relationship be- 
tween the welfare of the State and the legis- 
lation interfering with private conduct cannot 
be considered an unwholesome requirement. 
If we have reached the point where the courts 
freely admit the legality of such acts as ap- 
pear to reasonable men to be of benefit to the 
public, the courts cannot justly be charged 
with acting as mere obstructions to the will 
of the people. 

Democratic developments of the last half 
century are distinguished, therefore, by the 
efforts of the people to promote public wel- 
fare by legislation. Individual liberty and 
corporate action are limited and restrained 
for the general social good; a wide domain 
of legislation and administration has been 
entered upon, a domain undreamed of by the 
fathers. At the beginning of the nineteenth 
century Jefferson announced as the great 
requisite to complete the circle of our happi- 
ness a wise and frugal government which 
would maintain order and leave to the people 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 161 

freedom of looking after their own affairs. 
No one would now call such a government 
democratic. But we have still to discover 
how wise and frugal and efHcient a democ- 
racy can be that has assumed the responsi- 
bility of a new paternalism. 

State constitutions have been greatly en- 
larged in the last half century. In place of 
the brief direct documents of early days that 
contained httle more than a description of 
government and a statement of fundamental 
rights, we now have elaborate instruments 
containing orders, prohibitions, and explicit 
legislation on a variety of topics. The con- 
stitutions have been used as a means of direct 
popular legislation; for all through these 
later years the competence of the ordinary 
Legislature has been subject to a vague dis- 
trust, often too well founded. This distrust 
and the rising confidence in the judgment of 
the people have brought forth, not only 
elaborate constitutions filled with legislative 
enactment, but provision for the initiative, 
referendum, and recall. The cure for the 
ills of democracy, reformers declared, was to 
bring in more democracy, a democracy which 



162 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

would allow the people by direct pronounce- 
ment to obtain their desires. 

Many people, in recent years, have gone 
so far as to call representative government a 
failure, though how we can have anything 
but a government by representatives it is 
hard to see. All the outcry against our 
forms of government and against our consti- 
tutional system appears to me unjustified, 
though the criticism in the days before the 
war was characteristic of an uneasy and 
changing democracy. If we can elect cap- 
able and honest men to public office, our in- 
stitutions will not hamper the soul of the 
nation. The task of modern political democ- 
racy is to elect honest and capable men to 
office; such discouragement as we often en- 
dure can be attributed to popular heedless- 
ness, to the depressing readiness of the 
masses of the people, especially those having 
most to gain from honest administration, to 
follow party lines thoughtlessly and to yield 
to incompetent leadership or worse. No 
mere modification of written documents can 
supply the want of conscientious attention to 
the power of the ballot. 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 163 

Recent democratic movement — not every- 
body would call it progress — is well indicated 
by the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amend- 
ments, both adopted in 1913. The Seven- 
teenth, providing for the popular election of 
senators, was the product of intense dis- 
satisfaction with the unseemly and some- 
times scandalous election wrangles in State 
Legislatures; and the people believed that 
they were quite competent to choose senators 
themselves. The indirect method of election 
which the framers of the Constitution had 
established may have been suited to the 
timid and half-conscious democracy of the 
eighteenth century, but the system had been 
outgrown by the twentieth century. There 
is no use in arguing that we shall not get 
better senators by the new method of direct 
choice; the people, in this, as in some other 
respects, impatient with representative 
systems, wanted to try the job themselves. 

The Sixteenth Amendment too was the re- 
sult of years of discussion. Its adoption 
marks the end of a long effort, begun a gen- 
eration or so ago, to use the income tax as a 
method of making wealth bear what was 



164 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

thought to be its fair burden of taxation. 
The amendment provides that the national 
government can levy taxes on incomes with- 
out apportionment among the States, as 
originally provided by the Constitution.^ 
The principle of graduation has now been 
adopted, and, judging from our experiences 
with war taxes, a way has been found to ward 
off what used to be called *'the menace of 
great wealth." Whether you term this 
democracy or not, the Sixteenth Amendment 
and graduated income taxation must be 
deemed the most considerable result of some 
decades of political agitation and of social 
unrest; for a generation men had been per- 
plexed by developing wealth and continuing 
poverty, and some there were who believed 
both were foreign to successful democracy. 

It is a very striking fact, as Lord Bryce 
has pointed out, that for many decades writ- 
ten constitutions were demanded by liberals 



^The Constitution provides that "direct taxes" levied by 
the national government must be distributed among the 
States in accordance with population. In 1895 the Supreme 
Court decided that a tax on incomes, from most sources, was 
a direct tax. 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 165 

struggling to build up and safeguard liberty, 
while now the written constitution is upheld 
by the conservative elements of the com- 
munity, though they too declare their object 
is to protect liberty and the rights to honestly 
acquired property. Few things better il- 
lustrate the changes that have come in the 
development of modern popular govern- 
ment. But one can well doubt whether a 
radical change in our form of government 
would aid materially in the wise solution of 
our social problem. Naturally, if we do not 
desire any protection of property, any safe- 
guards of what used to be called individual 
liberty and constitutional law, anything, in 
fact, but the immediate establishment of 
what the majority wants or thinks it wants, 
such a consummation might be gained by 
scrapping everything we have. But those 
who complain of courts and constitutions do 
not, in my judgment, fully appreciate how 
rapidly popular desires are fulfilled and how 
amenable are the judges and officeholders to 
the public will. While judicial precedents 
and party intrigue often do present obstacles, 
the impressive fact is the rapidity with which 



166 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

changes come. No one conversant with our 
judicial history for the last thirty years will 
deny it. The truth is, the obstacles to re- 
form, as far as it can be obtained by legisla- 
tion at all, are due, first, to the difficulty in 
obtaining an aroused and determined public 
opinion — and until there is a decided ma- 
jority conscious of its purpose, changes 
ought not to come ; second, to obstacles such 
as would arise under any system of formal 
government, namely, incompetence, pressure 
from well-organized minorities, occasional 
corruption and malign influences, and heed- 
lessness of the voter. When there is among 
the people a well-considered desire for a 
change it comes. Public opinion is powerful 
and commanding. 

Other countries have outstripped the 
United States in providing certain kinds of 
social legislation, though we have made great 
strides even in the last ten years. This com- 
parative backwardness is due not so much to 
inadequacy or awkwardness of our govern- 
mental system as to various other things: 

(1) to the constant stream of immigration; 

(2) to the abundance of laborers; (3) to the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 167 

fact that until recently we had an open West 
and still have opportunities not offered by 
other countries, and that we have conse- 
quently not felt the pressure of the economic 
system as have the people of Europe; (4) to 
the size of the country and the difficulty of 
getting a consensus of opinion; (5) to the 
diversity of occupations and to the fact that 
there are large sections of the country in 
which people, engaged in agriculture, are un- 
aware of the problems and perplexities of big 
industry and of urban communities; (6) to 
the peculiar perversity with which men ad- 
here to parties on traditional hues, partly 
because of the history of the United States 
with its sectionalism and its particular loy- 
alties and differing memories ; (7) to the fact 
that for various reasons we have no liberal 
party in America; (8) to the discouraging 
frequency with which those who have most to 
gain from honest and forward-looking gov- 
ernment, see fit, particularly in our muni- 
cipalities, to select, not wise, honest, and cap- 
able administrators, but incapable triflers 
having no social vision. 



168 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE IMPLICATIONS AND RE- 
SPONSIBILITIES OF DEMOC- 
RACY TO-DAY 

In discussing successive experiences of 
America as a popular state, and in trying to 
present some of the steps in the develop- 
ments of democracy, I have refrained from 
any serious effort to describe democracy ex- 
cept as certain phases or aspects of it ap- 
peared in our actual life history. I refrained 
too from attempting to lay down an inclusive 
definition. Such a course appeared neces- 
sary, if I would not attribute to American 
democracy of the past all that we now find 
to be theoretically involved in the action 
and character of a thoroughly democratic 
people. If we analyze the subject, we 
shall see that we now find imphed in it much 
that men would not have seen or not accepted 
in most of the decades of the past. Inasmuch 
as a democratic society includes naturally 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 169 

within itself the character,the aspirations, and 
the quahties of the main body of the people, 
we must expect, as the years go by, that some 
of the characteristics of democracy, portions 
at least of its visible significance, will vary. 
Successive experiences and developing social 
needs recreate, modify, and enlarge the 
scope and content of democratic responsi- 
bility. 

Furthermore, a great war has been fought 
with the strength of millions to make democ- 
racy safe and to preserve for ourselves and 
for our children's children a spirit and an in- 
spiration. Young men by the hundred 
thousand he in Flanders' fields or in the 
rugged ravines of the Argonne, martyrs for 
the cause of democratic justice. We have 
therefore been enabled to see, or we ought to 
have been enabled to see, the full significance 
of democracy as a principle of life. Much of 
the discussion of democracy in the past ap- 
pears to rest on the supposition that America 
was democratic, that we always embodied all 
of the qualities of democracy, that we were 
a charming example of all the virtues and all 
the capabilities of a thorough and utterly 



170 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

sincere democratic nation. Do not so under- 
stand what I shall have to say about the 
meaning of democracy and what is involved 
in the full philosophy of democracy. 
America has more or less consciously striven 
to be democratic ; we have more or less hon- 
estly sought to be a really popular state, and 
we have partly succeeded under circum- 
stances that were on the whole favorable. 
But to-day more than ever before we should 
be aware of our failings, see our responsi- 
bilities, and seek earnestly to live up to the 
tasks of a real, a newly inspired, and a devel- 
oping democracy. 

I speak of a rejuvenated and newly in- 
spired democracy, because, if we have seen 
democracy at its full stature, we may ques- 
tion its vitality. If we have faith in continu- 
ous enlargement, we may have confidence in 
its permanence, we may be sure that it was 
something worth dying for, and, what is 
more, something worth living for. And, 
after all, that is the great human question; 
if men died for it, will the rest of us live for 
it? 

No quality or condition of life is perma- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 171 

nent ; there must come change. We now are 
wondering, however, whether in our effort to 
secure what we thought most essential we 
have been swept on by a tide of human pas- 
sions, which has deposited us at the feet of a 
new despotism, which disregards the old re- 
straint of the democratic state and the 
democratic society. It almost seems as if all 
civilization were suffering from shell shock, 
beset by dangers of aberration and psychical 
derangement. Under the old name and with 
new watchwords are men to fashion a new 
tyranny or is there to come a refreshment of 
the spirit and enlargement of freedom? I 
am not going to speak of Bolshevism as a 
creed or a practice; I wish only to impress 
the thought that not even democracy can 
stand still, and to present the possibility that 
it faces a new peril. We have already seen 
that what we have called democracy in this 
country has passed through various phases. 
If democracy after its struggle for self- 
preservation is quite content, then it is no 
longer quite alive; it may go down before 
new vitalities. An embalmed democracy 
deserves burial. 



172 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

The fullest meaning of democracy may be 
brought out by contrasting it with autoc- 
racy ; that is why the war should have made 
us see all that is impHed in the institutions 
and ideals we fought for. Let us, then, ex- 
amine the philosophy of autocracy, and, in 
order to understand what we fought for, let 
us first understand what we fought against. 
To analyze democracy is no easy task be- 
cause it is alive; to vivisect democracy is 
harder than to hold an autopsy on autocracy. 

An autocratic government is one recogniz- 
ing no authority beyond itself; it acknowl- 
edges no responsibility to externals. Its 
power is spontaneous, intrinsic, or inherent. 
Its main rehance, its main resting place, is 
force. There may be no need of continuous 
display of power ; but the nature of the insti- 
tution demands the self-will of the autocrat 
and the obedience of the subject. It is the 
duty of an autocrat not to carry out the 
will of others, but to bend all the rest to his 
will ; if he does not, he ceases to be autocratic. 
Necessarily, the state and the government are 
one; Louis XIV was quite right when he 
said ''L'etat cest moir ; he was the possessor 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 173 

of sovereignty, and sovereignty is the pecu- 
liar possession of the state. 

Autocracy requires segregation for safety. 
If there is a divinity which doth hedge a king, 
the hedges must be scrupulously maintained. 
If no man is great to his valet, everything 
must be done to shut out the vulgar from the 
sacred presence of the would-be great. Ac- 
cessibility may be an amiable quality in a 
king, but it endangers his character as an 
autocrat; he must be kept apart from the 
conflicting and modifying currents of life. 
I do not maintain that all autocrats have 
been personally inaccessible; but to the ex- 
tent that they practice accessibility or feel the 
pull of anything outside themselves they 
cease to be really and primarily autocratic. 

This need of segregation or aloofness rests 
in part on the assumption of superiority. No 
autocrat doubting his own wisdom would be 
more than a whited sepulcher, though I ad- 
mit he might still be a ravening wolf. Any 
recognition by an autocratic monarch or an 
autocratic aristocracy that help can be 
gained from the opinion of others under- 
mines their fortress. They are of bluer 



174 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

blood and of finer clay. To strengthen this 
position of authority they call upon God as 
the source of their peculiar superiority. Be- 
cause of this superiority they must cut them- 
selves off from surrounding life. This, of 
course, begets a degree of insanity, for only 
by human contacts can one remain psycho- 
logically wholesome. 

Autocracy leans upon deceit. The auto- 
crat need not always be deceitful; but when 
the lion's skin runs short he will "eke it out 
with the fox's." He has no duty but to serve 
himself. To deceive the multitude can be no 
sin if he helps himself to greater security. 
And if active deceit is not always needful, 
secrecy is the inevitable companion of 
superiority and aloofness. So closely allied 
are stealth and secrecy that it requires the 
microscope of the practiced casuist to dis- 
tinguish one from the other, and both are 
the parents of intrigue. 

To this sum of the virtues of autocracy 
should be added cruelty — not perhaps a 
quality necessarily indulged in. But how is 
one to judge of cruelty? If one maintains 
aloofness and superiority, how can one know 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 175 

how his acts torture the common man? No 
one can retain human compassion by shut- 
ting himself off from human sympathy. 
Sympathy is certainly denied the autocrat, 
because it means fellow feeling, and there are 
no fellows; all are his underlings. 

I have not been contending that any 
person was ever a perfect autocrat ; it would 
probably not be hard to point out almost 
perfectly functioning autocratic aristoc- 
racies. But that is neither here nor there. 
My main contention is that there was a 
nature in this thing we are dissecting, there 
was a logic in its life. It was living up to 
the philosophy of its own being, living up to 
the impulses of its own life, when it lived up 
to irresponsibility — irresponsibility to ex- 
ternal compulsion, be it legal, moral, or spir- 
itual. No human organization has as such 
a higher law than the law of self-preservation 
and self-expression, and the law of autocracy 
must be that of self -consideration, and that 
alone. To the extent that it considers others 
it invalidates itself. 

When Mr. Wilson called America to 
arms, bidding us fight against autocracy, we 



176 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

thought at first, as possibly he did, of the 
enormities and cruel willfulness of autocratic 
government. We were justified in so think- 
ing ; the Kaiser and the men surrounding him 
displayed to the world various obvious perils 
in a government whose chieftain spoke of 
himself as the commander of an armed 
nation and as one relying on the strong arm 
of a Teutonic God. But we soon saw more 
than this ; we saw Germany as an organized 
nation in arms playing the role of the auto- 
crat among the nations of the world. We 
saw her practicing irresponsibility, laying in- 
ternational law aside, using brute force to get 
her way, trampling upon her inferiors, in- 
dulging in intrigue, using frightfulness as a 
weapon. She could not acknowledge the 
binding character of moral obligation, she 
could not accept the common opinion of the 
world without recognizing external au- 
thority, something above her own self-will. 
No nation that opposed her plans merited 
pity, for her highest duty was to herself. She 
was typically, logically, adequately auto- 
cratic. 

No nation can adopt a form and principle 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 177 

of government and placidly acquiesce in it, 
without tolerating, probably admiring, the 
philosophy on which such government rests. 
The character of a people is bound to show 
itself more or less fully in the scheme of 
political order with which it is content. 
But, generalization aside, no one can doubt 
the symmetry of the Teutonic organiza- 
tion. Germany was self-willed, Germany 
was superior, Germany relied on force, 
Germany would not permit the crudities 
of outside civilization to mar her own 
Kultur, Germany must be dominant, not 
co-operative. When Grey asked the Ger- 
man foreign office in 1914 to confer and 
discuss, and not to plunge recklessly into 
war, the request was pushed haughtily aside. 
It is not consistent with the self-will of a 
superior being to indulge in conversations. 
And thus we see it was a state of mind the 
world fought against, the autocratic state of 
mind — aloofness which begat peculiarity and 
obliquity — a dehumanizing because an un- 
companionable state of mind. An English- 
man said not long ago that the "primary 
fault of Germany was ingrained determina- 



178 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

tion not to permit a free meeting of minds 
between people and people." How could a 
nation permeated by the philosophy of au- 
tocracy permit free, open, cordial inter- 
change of opinion, the building up of a com- 
munity of sentiment or judgment? 

If, now, we have performed this hurried 
autopsy, we may take up the vivisection. 
And yet, perhaps, it is quite unnecessary, for 
democracy is just the opposite of all these 
things; and if it be intent on self-preserva- 
tion, on living up to the logic of its own 
being, it will shun the whole philosophy of 
autocracy as it would the plague. 

In a democracy the masses of the people 
are supposed to participate in their own gov- 
ernment. What is called the government is 
the creature and agent of the state. This 
government has no inherent power, nothing 
intrinsically its own. The center of its char- 
acter is responsibility to the main body of the 
people. All authority is a trust. The justi- 
fication of democracy as a form of govern- 
ment is that it is natural, not artificial; gov- 
ernmental action, is supposed to conform, 
and in a perfect democracy will conform to 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 179 

the wishes of the people. It is not necessary 
to assume that men always choose aright, but 
only that they strive to satisfy natural 
desires. 

Democratic government is responsive gov- 
ernment. Whether men always choose cor- 
rectly or know their own needs better than a 
selected few can tell them is not now the 
question. Democracy's justification of itself 
is that it is natural and that there are tides of 
human impulse sweeping through the masses 
of men, instinctive longings and cravings, to 
which government must respond. No ex- 
traneous, superimposed, semidetached gov- 
ernment, above all not one tainted with ir- 
responsibility, can be sensitive to the devel- 
oping needs of mankind. 

I shall not, however, longer dwell upon 
democracy merely as a form of government. 
No one can speak for a moment of political 
machinery without finding himself beginning 
to wander into life beyond the borders of 
mere mechanism. So closely associated are 
the assumptions of political democracy with 
the activities and spirit of everyday hfe, so 
intimate are political forms, if they be more 



180 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

than form, in their reactions on daily eon- 
duct, that it is ahnost impossible to dis- 
tinguish the character of the people from the 
nature of its government. So all-permeat- 
ing is a principle of political organization, or 
so single are the thoughts of men, that the 
logic of a political system affects ethical con- 
ceptions, social relationship, ecclesiastical 
organization, and theological tenets. Modern 
theology, for example, is the theology of 
democratic brotherhood coupled with free- 
dom of the individual ; and we have seen that 
the Puritans established their church on con- 
tract, elaborated a contractual pohtical 
philosophy, and bound Almighty God by his 
own constitutional covenants. 

As democratic government is responsible 
government, acknowledging that power and 
authority rest on consent and agreement, so 
it inculcates the sense of responsibility in 
every member of the state. Unless the in- 
dividual, recognizing the ethical principle 
upon which the theory of the state rests, is 
prepared to shoulder his burden and do his 
part, that theory remains in part a theory. 
Here we reach another justification of the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 181 

democratic system. It suggests responsi- 
bility in each individual, and not only the 
need of doing for himself, but of living for 
others. If the philosophy of the popular 
state actually stimulates this feeling of obli- 
gation, this duty to act and to live in social 
order, then the state by its very nature, by 
the logic of its being, by the necessity of self- 
realization, awakens the most fundamental 
of human virtues. 

Democracy rests on faith. It confides in 
the fundamental validity of human nature. 
It believes that men can be trusted, and, 
while they may fall into error, they will 
naturally on the whole seek out the good. 
Its philosophy is, therefore, the philosophy 
of optimism ; and it is perfectly natural that 
it should have arisen in its modern form in 
America, where men are perhaps optimistic 
because they are democratic, but certainly 
are democratic because they are optimistic. 
Once again we find ourselves in the realm of 
ethics, and even theology. It was inevitable 
that modern American democracy should 
have its rise in the mind and heart of a Vir- 
ginian who had broken away from the old- 



182 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

fashioned views of theology and reUgion, and 
looked upon the Creator of the universe as a 
Father who was interested in the lives of his 
children, rather than as a Judge who was 
intent upon condemning them to everlasting 
fire. The one thought we always have, even 
when not wholly conscious of it, is that men 
are capable of progress and that the future 
surely contains within itself a higher and 
better order of things than we now see about 
us. In all that we do we are inspired by the 
belief that, little by little, step by step, men 
are lifting themselves to a higher stage of 
civilization and to a higher plane of char- 
acter. The autocratic or oligarchic state, by 
the very logic of its being, loses the inspira- 
tion that comes from faith. Faith and au- 
tocracy are enemies, and the very system of 
the state suggests content with a static condi- 
tion, not to say despair, rather than move- 
ment toward a better and brighter future. 
If we speak more simply and in the terms 
of practical politics, this faith foundation of 
the democratic state means that on the whole 
there is no surer criterion for what is wise in 
political action than the judgment of the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 183 

main body of the people. This does not 
mean that men are perfect in the mass; for 
they cannot well be, inasmuch as they are not 
individually perfect. It simply means that 
the judgments of the whole are likely in the 
long run to be the surest guides as to what is 
best for the whole. As faith in the quality of 
the masses of men is an inspiration to each 
one of us individually and affects our 
temperament in all matters of social life, so 
the faith which is reposed in the individual 
man helps to make him more worthy of con- 
fidence. If one believes that other men have 
no faith in him, he must almost surely lose 
faith in himself. "Was there not," says 
Morley, "a profound and far-reaching truth 
wrapped up in Goethe's simple yet really in- 
exhaustible monition, that if we would im- 
prove a man, it would be well to let him be- 
lieve that we already think him that which we 
would have him to be?"^ 

Democracy has been called the hope of the 
world. It is hope. As Jefferson said, men 
have the natural right to "pursue happiness." 
Unhopeful democracy does not amount to 

^ "Essay on Carlyle," Miscellanies, vol. i, p. 192. 



184 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

anything. Henry Adams pictures Jeffer- 
son as saying to himself: "If fifty years hence 
the average man shall invariably argue from 
two ascertained premises where he now 
jumps to a conclusion from a single sup- 
posed revelation — that is progress ! I expect 
it to be made here, under our democratic 
stimulants, on a great scale, until every man 
is potentially an athlete in body and an 
Aristotle in mind." In speaking of the 
characteristic optimism of the Americans of 
one hundred years ago and more, Adams 
said: "If the priests and barons who set their 
names to Magna Charta had been told that 
in a few centuries every swineherd and 
cobbler's apprentice would write and read 
with an ease such as few kings could then 
command, and reason with a better logic than 
any university could then practice, the 
priests and barons would have been much 
more incredulous than any man who was told 
in 1800 that within another five centuries the 
ploughboy would go a-field whistling a 
sonata of Beethoven and figure out in 
quaternions the relation of his furrows." 
This recognition that faith is our soul's 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 185 

salvation is the cause of our anxiety in these 
passing days — not that we fear for our prop- 
erty, not that we are afraid of national dis- 
comfiture, not that we stand sponsor for any 
given international or even for any particu- 
lar economic system — but that we fear for 
the philosophy of our daily life, fear that we 
may be robbed of our faith, fear that we may 
stand naked and unarmed in the presence of 
facts appearing to demonstrate that men are 
not sufficiently wise, generous, magnanimous, 
and self -restrained to move steadily forward 
toward the goal of their own greater good. 
Democracy rests upon education. Of 
course it is conceivable that in a perfectly 
simple state with narrow limits you might 
have democracy without very much intel- 
ligence, but in the compexity of modern life 
it is utterly impossible to carry forward the 
affairs of popular government without wide 
and sound education. We sometimes 
wonder, not so much whether men are mor- 
ally capable of living up to their responsi- 
bilities, as whether the human intellect is 
capable of actually solving the problems of 
modern life and managing public affairs for 



186 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

the common good. Society has become so 
intricate, there are so many interrelations 
and interdependencies, that we are sometimes 
staggered at the very prospect and shrink 
from the attempt to find intellectual solu- 
tions for our problems. 

Because of some vague appreciation of 
these responsibilities of popular government, 
the American people have always taken a 
lively interest in schools and colleges. There 
has appeared at times to be even a strange 
contradiction between the unstinted force 
of the whole educational system and 
the attitude of mind, or what seemed to 
be the attitude of mind, of the average 
American. Certainly until a short time 
ago the average business man and the 
great body of persons who had not them- 
selves received college education were in- 
clined to depreciate the value of any form 
of study which would not give immediate 
practical assistance in the business of making 
a living. The educated man was looked 
upon as quite a superfluity in public affairs ; 
and the theorist and even the expert were con- 
sidered abnormalities. The early life on the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 187 

frontier, leading men to think that the great- 
est achievement was to overcome the tangible 
and most immediate obstacles of nature, 
prompted them to look almost with disfavor 
on anything that was not adapted to the win- 
ning of the wilderness. And yet in spite of 
this, hardly were these Western settlements 
made, hardly, as Tyler says of the early New 
Englanders, were the stmnps brown in their 
earliest harvest field, or had the wolves ceased 
to howl about their nightly habitations, when 
they determined to found schools and col- 
leges and give their children the opportunity 
of education. The reason for this inconsist- 
ency, if such it were, is to be found partly in 
this unconscious realization that democracy 
depends upon an intelligent public, and 
partly, no doubt, on the fact that democracy 
is forward-looking; and if the early Ameri- 
can had no ancestors, he had at least pos- 
terity. If he had no past, the future be- 
longed to himself and, above all, to his 
children. 

But when I have said that democracy rests 
on education, and prompts wealthy men to 
endow schools and colleges, and leads the 



188 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

public to pour out its money in educational 
undertakings, I have been dwelling only on 
education in the very formal, though more 
ordinary sense of the word. The more im- 
portant truth is that democracy is itself edu- 
cating. The duties to which men are called, 
the matters which each individual man is 
asked to consider, in themselves demand 
thought. Any social or political system 
which asks the individual man to think is in 
the highest degree educating. Progress must 
come from human effort, and, above all, from 
the effort to think. "In the free state," said 
the French philosopher, Montesquieu, "it 
does not make so very much difference 
whether men think things out correctly or 
incorrectly. The important thing is that 
they think at all." 

At times in the course of heated elections, 
when complicated questions of state are in- 
volved, we doubt whether the untrained 
public is capable of understanding the actual 
issues. The truth simply is that in a free 
state it does not make such a tremendous 
amount of difference whether a question is 
thought out correctly or not, if men by their 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 189 

responsibilities are tempted to think about 
things which otherwise they would have no 
thought about. The educational and uphft- 
ing force comes from reaching out for ideas 
and logical principles just a little bit beyond 
our reach; and it is this reaching, this effort 
to do what one has not done before, this at- 
tempt to grasp what is perhaps unattainable, 
that is most desirable. It is better that men 
should reach and fail to grasp than never to 
have reached at all. 

Democracy is fundamentally a matter of 
human relationships. I have been contend- 
ing that possibly its chiefest value resulted 
from its necessary reactions upon the in- 
dividual man. But democracy as we have 
come to conceive it is not an individual thing 
at all. And still, democracy demands free- 
dom; it cannot survive, it does not exist, 
under the weight of super-imposed burdens 
as distinguished from self-imposed. There 
are two kinds of morahty in the world, and 
only two; and one of them is not morality. 
Obedience in response to externally applied 
compulsion need not be termed a virtue; 
though compulsion is needed to restrain the 



190 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

criminal-minded man or the criminal-minded 
state, obedience is necessitated by immor- 
ality. Only internal compulsion, or obedi- 
ence to one's own inner sense of obligation, 
is real morality. Now, the democratic state 
calls on men to assmne burdens, to compel 
themselves to act rightly and justly because 
they believe in right and justice. 

There is a perilous notion abroad in the 
land that we should imitate Germany and 
rear passive obedience to external order into 
exalted virtue, and that by discipline, train- 
ing, command, we should create character. 
This is all at variance with democratic phil- 
osophy and with the philosophy of our edu- 
cational system. Modern education has 
thriven and justified itself by seeking to re- 
lease faculties, to develop self-command, to 
awaken self-reliance, to establish responsi- 
bility. Our educational system and phil- 
osophy have been justified in the crisis. The 
young men from our college halls flocking 
unbidden to officers' training camps showed 
intellectual keenness and eagerness; they 
showed power in analyzing problems, and a 
readiness to assume unwonted duties of com- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 191 

mand because they had been led by freedom 
of college life and college teaching to com- 
mand themselves. This capacity for re- 
sponsible leadership filled us with merited 
pride. In the terrible battles on the Meuse 
and in the Argonne, young fellows but a year 
or two out of college, working over an un- 
known terrain, leading a body of unskilled 
men, their superior officers sick or wounded 
or dead, carried the burdens of terrifying 
responsibility with a calm and courageous 
strength which is one of the soul-stirring 
facts of the war. 

This, I maintain, was the outstanding les- 
son of the war. The German soldier doubt- 
less had a consuming, almost a fanatical love 
of his race and his fatherland, and I would 
not rob the fallen soldiers of their meed of 
praise, if it is needed, for their readiness to 
sacrifice. But to my mind the great in- 
spiring sight was the rise of free peoples to 
struggle unbidden for justice, their readiness 
to offer their lives for tmcompelled duty. 
And possibly the most wholesome and 
uplifting sight of all was the way in 
which the free peoples of the free Brit- 



192 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

ish empire — in Australia, New Zealand, 
Canada, South Africa — nations nourished 
in freedom, rose almost to a man to per- 
form prodigies of valor on the fields of 
death. For it gave us new assurance that 
empires could be reared on freedom and that 
men would not cravenly steal to safety be- 
hind the curtain of irresponsibility. The 
boys too that went from these halls and other 
college halls openly, frankly, welcoming 
danger, welcoming it with a pathetic high- 
heartedness that wrung our own souls, 
proved to us, if proof were needed, the com- 
pelling power of duty. You may lament 
that we were so slow ; you may complain be- 
cause we did not go into the war sooner ; you 
may beheve that delay was in the long run 
wasteful of life ; but as for me, I know of no 
more inspiring fact in history than the calm, 
though slow, deliberation of a hundred mil- 
lion people making up their own minds to do 
what they believed ought to be done. 

Freedom begets responsibility; freedom 
creates duties; freedom binds men together 
in fellowship. This is only one of those 
paradoxes of which human life is full. The 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 193 

student of the philosophy of society knows 
that society flourishes on mutually support- 
ing contradictions. So democracy, calling 
upon the individual to live and act, is at war 
with irresponsible individualism. One of my 
colleagues, with a wit suited to Sydney 
Smith or a regenerated Voltaire, once de- 
fined an afternoon reception as a clever social 
device for giving the least possible pleasure 
to the largest possible number. I may stop 
to say that even the afternoon-reception 
variety of democracy is at least as praise- 
worthy as the more decorous and not less 
formal autocracy. For if democracy at its 
worst is but an uncomfortable and perhaps 
uncomforting elbowing and pushing for the 
ices and cakes, resulting in the least possible 
gratification to the multitude, autocracy at 
its best, that is, acting most wholeheartedly 
in response to the law of its own being, seeks 
to give the greatest possible pleasure to the 
smallest possible number. 

But the afternoon reception does not 
typify real democracy, for democracy con- 
notes cooperation and relationships. Indi- 
vidualism is the result of disintegration ; its 



194 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

motive is detachment. Democracy is asso- 
ciation. You cannot take a man out into the 
wilderness and leave him with the admonition 
that he be a good democrat. Democracy re- 
quires companionship. Without contacts, 
nay without wholeness, without social 
soHdarity, it is only partly itself. If a neigh- 
borhood, a nation, a college, is divided into 
groups that are self-willed, self-seeking, un- 
communicative, it is not democratic — for 
mere poverty or mere simpHcity or mere un- 
sophistication, though often called the ele- 
ments of democracy, are not so at all. You 
cannot have — need I say it? — ^you cannot 
have popular government, popular deter- 
mination ; you cannot have popular anything, 
without a populace which feels itself a whole. 
I have not touched on the vexed question 
of social equahty, or, indeed, on equality at 
all. I am not sure that in the future, if 
democracy ever reaches perfection, equality 
will be considered an essential attribute. 
There is no equality in nature, and an artifi- 
cially imposed equality can scarcely be called 
democratic. The whole subject is so full of 
perplexing and alluring difficulties that more 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 195 

time is needed for its discussion than I can 
here properly devote to it. Some things, 
however, are obvious. Democracy, as we 
have known it, has meant progress and op- 
portunity, not an unvarying dead-level 
achievement; it has rested on thrift and en- 
terprise and individual judgment and 
energy; it has given or allowed its rewards, 
doubtless overlavishly, to shrewdness and in- 
dividual skill. But a society which does not 
prompt men to move and to exert themselves 
can scarcely survive. Equality before the 
law we all acknowledge as a necessity ; and if 
it is not a reality, it must be made so, a real 
equality before the bar of justice. 

Almost from the beginning in America, 
and most notably since men began to pour 
in eager armies through the passes of the 
Appalachians to seize upon the lands of the 
Mississippi basin and to develop its re- 
sources, "success" has been the outstanding 
word in American civilization. Every school- 
boy was urged to win success in life, and gen- 
erally the thought was of pecuniary success. 
It is symptomatic of recent America that 
that word no longer holds its dominating 



196 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

position, and, if it is used, connotes some- 
thing new. The winning of a great fortune 
is not now looked upon as the only success in 
life, if it be success at all ; and the holders of 
vast wealth are judged by others and they 
judge themselves by the skill and wisdom 
and public spirit with which they give their 
money away. We do not know how far this 
attitude toward the amassing of fortunes will 
develop in the days to come, or how far men 
should be deterred or restrained in their 
efforts to make and control money and more 
money. And I think we do not need to 
know. We do know that society lives and 
is changing before our eyes and that there is 
a deepening sense of social responsibility in 
the minds of the fortunate and the prosper- 
ous. After all is said, responsibility is the 
word and the spirit which separates democ- 
racy from its antagonist, its essential enemy, 
autocracy. Doubtless we are entering upon 
a stage different from that created by the 
frontier life of the American people, and 
service is supplanting success. It is, more- 
over, not alone the rich that must cherish re- 
sponsibility, but the poor as well. Or, if we 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 197 

can reasonably hope for the disappearance 
of real poverty, as we must and may hope, 
the less fortunate and the less gifted must 
bear their share of obligation to the state, to 
themselves, and to their neighbors. 

I have no doubt that industry must be 
democratized and that the process is going 
on. But unless we have passed on to a stage 
of mere negation, such democratization does 
not involve the destruction of expert guid- 
ance or the denial of appropriate pecuniary 
reward; it does not involve domination by 
the ignorant and the incapable, or the be- 
numbing of individual initiative. It does 
mean probably a widening of companionship, 
a strengthening of responsibility, a humaniz- 
ing and liberalizing of authority, a deepening 
of duty, a banishing of unintelligent enmity. 
It does mean — ^this process of democratiza- 
tion — an integrating process, a wholesomiz- 
ing process, based on a sense of individual 
selfrespect and social esteem. Unless the 
past has led us quite astray, these are the 
natural products of a developing humanity 
under the inspiriting suggestions of a po- 
litical system which decries willfulness. 



198 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

The industrial revolution began only 
about one hundixd and fifty years ago ; it has 
shown its effects clearly only through the 
past seventy-five years. Only during the 
past one hundred and fifty years has modern 
inductive science been applied to mechanical 
invention and wrought the marvelous change 
in habit, environment, and necessities of men. 
Taken all in all, this was probably the great- 
est transformation suffered by the human 
race since. man first learned to make fire. 
Indeed, the change from tools to machinery 
and, above all, from tools to machinery 
driven by nonhuman power, may be consid- 
ered almost as momentous as the change 
from the unaided human hand and claw to 
tools. Count this gross exaggeration, if you 
wish; but you still will see it is nothing but 
sheer folly to suppose that the industrial 
organization of society is to find a quasi- 
permanent, human, and satisfying form in a 
few decades after the revolution has shown 
its results. Ultimately, it may be, society 
will be stabilized; but surely it will not be 
to-day or to-morrow. The most we have the 
right to demand and expect is that social re- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 199 

arrangements will be brought on by reason- 
able adjustment, not by autocratic brute 
force; that the philosophy and spirit of 
democracy will enable men to work out re- 
sults by agreements and accommodations 
and intelligent consent. 

Publicity is the weapon of democracy. 
Not only is secrecy a source of danger, but it 
is in itself incompatible with popular govern- 
ment. How, pray, can people have opinions 
about things they know nothing of? And if 
there is no opinion, how can popular govern- 
ment exist at all? The openness of demo- 
cratic life sometimes seems to militate against 
privacy, not to say secrecy. To the inquisi- 
tive onlooker we appear to direct our po- 
litical affairs by mandates issued at elections, 
but we don't. We govern chiefly by public 
opinion, and if congressmen at times appear 
to insulate themselves from the vulgus and 
not to know what people are thinking, we are 
justly indignant. A democratic government 
cannot be an insulated government, cut off 
from the currents of life for two- or four- 
year periods. As publicity is an absolute 
essential, stealth and intrigue are impossible 



200 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

derivatives from democratic philosophy. I 
do not mean they do not exist. I mean that 
they are vices gnawing at the heart of the 
democratic state ; they are the weapons of a 
mean autocracy. 

There is now on foot a movement for 
Americanizing the immigrant. Plans are 
laid for inculcating certain knowledge, ex- 
tending the use of the English language, and 
developing a spirit of patriotism. Often, it 
seems to me, the motive of this effort is not 
quite clear. Is it based on some fear ? Must 
we believe that men must be given, if only by 
forcible inoculation, a readiness to fight for 
the flag? Is it based on the assumption that 
we have our own Kultur, high above all other 
brands, which must be accepted if civilization 
be secure ? If so, I am not confident of the 
justice, the wisdom, or the moral effects of 
the effort. But I am confident that social in- 
tegration must be secured, if democracy sur- 
vive; disintegration, intellectual separate- 
ness, differences of moral reactions on funda- 
mental problems of living, are unsocializing 
and hence inconsistent with community life 
and action. There must be understanding, 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 201 

freedom of intercourse, interchange of ideas 
between man and man, or there can be no 
creation of a common purpose. The flag, 
which we may all ignorantly worship, must 
be the symbol, not of a pugnacious patriot- 
ism, but of the common possession of a com- 
mon ideal. Democracy without community 
in things of the spirit is gross, material, and 
nevertheless unreal. America is safe as a 
democratic reality if there is a wide and deep 
devotion to a code of daily morality ; if there 
is no commonness, waving the flag is of little 
value. 

For this reason too we insist now on the 
use of the English language, not because it 
is better than others, not because we fear that 
the civilization it may carry with it is im- 
periled, not because of any mean nationalistic 
pride or envy or trepidation or enmity, but 
once again because communication and the 
creation of a public opinion which is the basis 
of free popular government are necessary if 
we would maintain and build up the thing 
our boys died for, the thing the masses of the 
plain people are praying for. The old say- 
ing, "Divide and rule," was the watchword 



202 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

of many an autocratic system; we have the 
right to say to people of the would-be popu- 
lar state, "Unite and rule"; you cannot 
possess your own government unless you as 
a whole people possess yourselves. 

We sometimes hear that democratic gov- 
ernment is government by the majority, or, 
that, on the other hand, a minority has 
certain rights and immunities beyond the 
reach of the majority. Perhaps, it is quite 
right to protect minorities as we have at- 
tempted to do by constitutional restraints; 
but neither one of these assertions expresses 
the philosophic content of democracy. In a 
free state the majority, by the nature of the 
state, has no right to legislate for itself alone. 
Fifty-one have no inherent authority to bully 
forty-nine ; that would be only autocracy on 
a large and unwholesome scale. Democracy 
rests on duty, not on privilege, and that is 
the lesson for both minorities and ma- 
jorities. The notion that we live in the 
presence of a persistent duahsm of ma- 
jorities and minorities, and the minor- 
ities have a shield and buckler protecting 
them from molestation may be partly true in 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 203 

fact; but it belies the spirit of democracy if 
not of ever-changing hf e ; it is in part a rehc 
of the half-democracy of the eighteenth 
century and of the principle of an unchang- 
ing natural law that cannot be moved one jot 
or one tittle. By the implications of a real 
democracy, minorities and individuals should 
be protected by the principle of freedom, by 
the duty of majorities to be responsible for 
others and not self-seeking, by the duty of 
minorities to accommodate themselves to 
public needs. 

The simple truth is that the truly popular 
state cannot be based on dualism, on continu- 
ous friction between fifty-one and forty-nine, 
on authority backed by protected privilege, 
or on unreasoning power supported by ma- 
jority strength. Need I repeat again that 
democratic government rests upon agree- 
ment ; that is, upon processes through which 
men come to common understanding? Life 
is not rigid; it is a series of adjustments and 
accommodations. A real democracy is con- 
stant rearrangement, adjustment, and as- 
similation. Irrespective of legal limitations, 
minorities must have their rights, because 



204 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

they are portions of the whole and because 
majorities carry responsibility for others. 
That is the philosophy of democracy. Jef- 
ferson announced that acquiescence in the 
decision of majorities was the vital principle 
of republics, but the purpose of the majority 
to be right must be reasonable. That is the 
simi of the whole matter. Democracy is not 
consistent with irreconcilable minorities; 
they must acquiesce ; and if the power of the 
larger number is to be guided by reason, it 
must come from reasoning, from discussion, 
from the upbuilding of a common purpose 
and a common life. Acquiescence is more 
difficult than domination: such is the lesson 
which the young fledgling democracies of 
eastern Europe must learn if they are to hold 
aloft on their adventurous flight. On the 
other hand, the tyranny of the sansculotte 
is no better than the despotism of the over- 
dressed. 

In the Gettysburg address Lincoln ap- 
pealed for a new birth of freedom. He 
hoped that those who died there, those that 
offered the last full measure of devotion, 
would create by their death a finer spirit for 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 205 

the living. He hoped that America would 
go on with a fuller life consecrated to free- 
dom and justice. But after that war came 
years of petty revengeful politics; and the 
men of America, for whom the heroes of 
Gettysburg perished, turned to the material 
tasks of a materialistic generation, to exploit- 
ing the natural resources of the continent, as 
if life were no more than meat or the body 
than raiment. In large measure they left 
the new birth of freedom to the none too 
tender care of wrangling and ambitious 
party leaders. It is not so easy now to shirk 
the responsibilities of the hour, because the 
West is gone ; and they must not be shirked, 
if democracy was worth dying for. The 
burdens of social responsibiUty lie at our 
very doors. If we insist on putting petty 
politicians into ofSce and on shunning the 
tasks which humanity here and in the world 
at large has thrust upon us, we shall shame 
the cause for which we fought and court dis- 
aster. Momentous as our victory in France 
may be, momentous in overturning Europe, 
in banishing autocracy, possibly even more 
important is the effect upon ourselves. Are 



206 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

those conquests by that maddening reacting 
perversity which muddies the whole stream 
of history, to make us vain, nationahstic, and 
domineering, or is there to be a freshening of 
hfe, a clarification of character? 

This war, we have asserted, is to make the 
world safe for democracy; but democracy 
can be safe only if it is democratic. The 
great question before the world to-day is 
whether America will play whole-heartedly 
the role of a democratic nation. That is the 
center of the whole world-problem. Democ- 
racy as a spirit, a spirit partly begotten and 
greatly enlarged and strengthened by a 
theory of political organization, has shown 
itself masterful, conquering, almost, it would 
seem, irresistible. Thrones have been over- 
turned, the secret chancelleries of nations 
have been opened to the gaze of an irreverent 
public, dynasties have disappeared, willful 
autocratic overlords have fled into the dark- 
ness. From the days when America, ac- 
knowledging a decent respect for the opinion 
of mankind, announced that governments 
obtain their just powers from the consent of 
the governed, the mills of the gods have been 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 207 

grinding not slowly but exceeding fine. It 
is easy enough for mole-eyed materialists to 
talk of territories and markets and economic 
penetrations and mailed fists and national 
armies and tribal gods, but the world has 
been changed under the hammering insist- 
ence of a principle of human life. Once and 
again, and most plainly last of all, democracy 
has risen in its armed might and hurled itself 
against its enemy. But its victories have on 
the whole been silent victories, untroubled by 
the din of physical warfare, unsullied by 
human sacrifice. The real struggle has been 
continuous, unintermitting, most real when 
most unnoticed. Democracy overthrew au- 
tocracy because it was life fighting with 
death, or youth with age. Autocracy was 
beaten in the war because it was beaten as a 
principle of living as a reality, before the war 
began. Wars only register conquests. Men 
and women that can read and think should 
see this thing plainly. 

And now that America has won, what will 
she do — America, who, cherishing, enlarging, 
and upbuilding the principles of British free- 
dom for which the men of Britain had them- 



208 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

selves struggled and suffered ; America, who, 
more than any other nation, unless it be the 
old and the regenerated England, is re- 
sponsible for this spread of democracy 
through the last century and a half — what 
will America do? Well, we are sometimes 
told she will now hve unto herself, scorn 
companionship, flout cooperation, shield her- 
self from duty, assume irresponsibility. 
Such words would be funny if they were not 
so serious ; all the more serious because they 
come from men who honestly think they are 
advocating actual American hf e and Ameri- 
can democracy. For this all means that we 
shall abjure democracy and refuse to act it 
out. We gave, forsooth, we gave our boys 
for revenge, to punish Germany, to ward off 
fear from our coasts, not to clarify and 
cleanse human life ; we sent those two million 
young fellows across the sea that we might 
be safe to lead an irresponsible existence, 
sharking for our own booty, heedless, con- 
tent — autocratic, because uncompanionable, 
superior, inaccessible, self-willed. 

Some things even the blind should see. We 
cannot act one thing and be another. If we 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 209 

would be democratic, we must act the demo- 
crat. In the world of international affairs 
we must maintain our faith, take courage 
from our belief in the hearts of men, rely on 
enlightened public opinion and strive to en- 
lighten it and our own minds, trust to the 
weapons of publicity as the foe of stealth and 
intrigue and hidden malice. We must cher- 
ish companionship, recognize life as a series 
of readjustments and accommodations, 
shoulder responsibilities, cast out mean fear 
even though it be called danger to the Mon- 
roe Doctrine, practice friendliness, and be 
high-hearted even as our boys were high- 
hearted and ready for service and death. 
"Small minds," said Burke, "and great em- 
pires go ill together." America if it would 
be great must be big-minded, magnanimous, 
and spiritually strong. If we deny ourselves 
in the wide currents of the world, refuse to 
act the democrat, decline to participate in a 
world-arrangement based on consent and 
agreement, pride ourselves on a puny-souled 
invulnerability, think we can shut ourselves 
off by a hedge of self-imposed divinity, we 
don't deserve to live as a democracy. We 



210 STEPS IN DEVELOPMENT 

shall not be a democracy. We shall have 
already fallen a prey to the cancer of auto- 
cratic irresponsibility, to the corroding acids 
of self-will. We cannot be inwardly demo- 
cratic and outwardly autocratic — inwardly 
hope-full, faith-full, friendly, frank, and 
humane, outwardly repelling, unsocial, sul- 
len, superior, distrustful, forceful. For the 
revivification of its own soul, the nation must 
act on the moral tenets of its own accepted 
philosophy or lose it, sear its own spirit, 
deaden its own life. As Germany at- 
tempted to play the role of the autocrat be- 
cause the nation was permeated with the phil- 
osophy of autocracy, America must play the 
democrat if she is filled with the spirit and 
the philosophy of democracy. 












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